Review by: Michael Barnes

The race kicks off and it’s amazing. You’re on a four-wheeler dropped off by a helicopter onto a course made of crumbling skyscrapers. Everyone hits the ground running, and there’s a mad scramble of off-road vehicles jockeying to get an early lead while making daredevil jumps through plate glass windows and through burning, abandoned offices. Helicopters fire missiles, collapsing highways and creating new routes. A bridge buckles and sways as you scurry across it to make it to a carrier that’s leaving the island. The visuals are stunning, the level of detail off the charts, and the vistas of destruction are truly eye-popping.

But once the gameplay kicks in, Motorstorm: Apocalypse crashes and burns. Literally.

Thirty seconds into the race you’ve crashed five times, including a couple of times were the restart point has placed you too close to a ramp to get enough speed to close the gap, causing a second crash after the first one. The diverting paths, coupled with other racers crashing and falling behind, have created a feeling that you’re not really racing against competitors because there are rarely any in sight on which to use your left and right boost-juke move keyed to the square and circle buttons.

It becomes clear that the reason that there is no speedometer or other metric devices other than a heat gauge for the X-button turbo boost is because there isn’t any depth beyond deciding when to risk blowing up the car to go just a little faster, which usually results in another crash. Drifting and drafting mechanics are barely noticeable, and differences between vehicles are shallow at best. Of course a superbike turns faster than a monster truck. But that’s about it.

As the latest installment of Sony’s Motorstorm franchise, the game certainly delivers on the established formula of simple, arcade-style off-road racing and virtually zero simulation elements. But its most exciting promise is in racing through a city in the throes of disaster. Earthquakes, tornadoes, fires, war, and other calamities are tearing a generic, vaguely San Francisco-like city apart resulting in some visually spectacular scripted events during races that change routes and create new hazards. It’s impossible to not be blown away by seeing colossal buildings toppling over into the track or racing along a beach struck by hurricane winds, with boats and other debris ripping across the waterfront.

The core single player “festival” mode tells the story of three different characters’ involvement with the racing events in The City (that’s what they call it). Really, it’s just a lame framework to give you a tour through all of the tracks and vehicles. The story is embarrassingly bad and filled with clichéd characters probably more suited to Mountain Dew advertisements with their laughable, “extreme” attitudes. Worst of all it’s presented in a cheap-looking and absolutely hideous motion comic style. It isn’t congruous with the rest of the production, and next to all of the expensive-looking visuals in the rest of the game it looks like a budgetary shortcut. The writing is embarrassing and juvenile to the extreme. I’m not sure who’s playing this game to see a silly love story between “Mash” and another female racer.