Reviews// MotorStorm Pacific Rift

I also mentioned water - it occurs naturally on some courses where you can or (if you take the wrong route) must drive through pools, along beach fronts or under waterfalls. Doing so will speed the rate at which your boost temperature drops; or if you are boosting through the pool, reduce or arrest the rate at which it increases. But the flipside of this is that different vehicles perform differently in water. Some are slowed slightly or not at all if you hit the water fast and boost through it, others are slowed to a crawl if you go in anything but the most shallow water. Again this affects your choice of route, and makes Pacific Rift a much more strategic racing game than its predecessor.

Unsurprisingly, water is not an abundant natural resource in the Fire Zone of Pacific Rift - where you tend to find the lava, so where you need it most. But the course designers have considered this, and have kindly provided drive-through showers, a sort of industrial version of those overhead sprays you sometimes get to cool you in the queue at theme parks on really hot days. As you would expect, these are positioned off the racing line and you have to weigh the benefits of cooling your boost against the downside of taking a detour. Strategy again!

The courses in Pacific Rift feel much more expansive, and are trickier to learn than those in the first MotorStorm game. Taking the wrong route can make all the difference between winning and coming mid-table. It is frustrating (and enjoyable) to go around a track time after time coming fourth or third, only to discover a route or short-cut you've driven by and ignored numerous times can cut seconds from your lap time and enable you to win.

Learning the tracks is vital to winning in Pacific Rift. A new feature - the "Speed" race will help you to do just that. As part of the Festival (the single-player game proper) you are required to complete events to progress through the game. The presentation of this aspect of the game is greatly simplified from the first game, where you had to page through screen after screen of event tickets to find ones you had not completed.

In Pacific Rift the events are divided into four areas: Air, Earth, Fire and Water. Air events tend to be high up, on mountain tops. Earth ones are in jungles. Water ones are on beaches and riverbeds, and Fire ones are near the molten magma. Most of the events are good old fashioned races, but there are also two other kinds of events. In Eliminator event, taken directly from Burnout, you race and periodically, the last vehicle is eliminated. If you make the top three you get a win, with the associated token, Gold, Silver or Bronze.

In Speed events, you have to follow a racing line defined by a series of gates in the form of smoke pots that are placed on the track. You start with a certain amount of time on your clock, and it begins to tick down. Each time you successfully pass through a gate, a few seconds are added to your time. Get through all the gates before the clock hits zero, and you get a bronze, do so with a defined amount of time on the clock, and you may get a silver or gold. New gates only appear once you've successfully passed through the previous one, which can make planning your route quite tricky. Therefore a good deal of trial and effort are sometimes required to complete the speed events in gold winning time.

In the normal race mode there are a couple of new features: the Wreck Limit and the Target Time. If you win a race that has either of these features and you do so with fewer wrecks, or in a faster time than the targets a special event is unlocked. In the case of a wreck limit, it's an "Eliminator", and in the case of a target time, it's a "speed" event. But the Wreck Limit and Target Time are both set so generously high that I never managed to win a race without coming in under them. Again they seem like an idea that was shoehorned in to add some variety, but in reality adds very little to the experience since you are unlikely to win a race without successfully beating them. I think the Wreck Limits should be eleminated and the only way to open Eliminator event should be to win the qualifying race with NO wrecks. The Target Times need to be shortened so that it is easily possible to win a race without making the target time.