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| Source // MobyGames |
Monument Valley. Iconic sandstone buttes towering above dusty, sun-soaked plains. Don't you just want to hold an over-the-top motorsport music festival right there, with loosely defined tracks around - and on top, and through - the mesas, designed for spectacle, rather than safety?
If the answer is yes - and the answer really ought to be yes - then the PlayStation 3 has you covered with MotorStorm, a chaotic, muddy thrill ride that tears through the landscape to the sounds of rock, metal, and metal colliding with rocks.
It was thoroughly enjoyable back in 2007. What about now?
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| Source // MobyGames |
Fun Times
MotorStorm begins with aerial footage of Monument Valley, a landscape you can't help but be in awe of, even if you've seen it many times before, most notably in Western films of old. As the shots go on, various vehicles creep into view, making their way towards a unknown destination that the narrator soon informs us is MotorStorm. We fly over a mesa blocking our view, revealing an almighty festival, a fusion of music and machine.
It's very much a party vibe, this racing game. Music plays over the top of everything, and the menus aren't bogged down in modes and options. MotorStorm just tells you to buckle up and gives you a few entry tickets to some easy races. Perform well to unlock more. Simple, straight forward, get going already.
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| Source // MobyGames |
If I'm going to grumble a little, it'll be about this ticket system. If you want to tear around your favourite track, there's no way to just load it up. You'll have to have access to a ticket that features it, but not only that, you'll have to be taking part in an event that has the right vehicle type you want as well.
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| Source // PlayStation |
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| Source // PlayStation |
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| Source // PlayStation |
If you're on a dirt bike and the rest of the pack are in trucks or buggies, you're going to feel awfully exposed on these circuits. One wrong move can and will result in you being thrown from your bike in what should be an instakill, but in this atmosphere is a more friendlier ghostly resetting of your vehicle instead.
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| Source // MobyGames |
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| Source // MobyGames |
How, then, are you expected to have a good race on a bike when a truck is threatening your life as well as the courses themselves? Well, the tracks in MotorStorm aren't your run of the mill racing circuits. They wouldn't meet any safety standards at all when half of them take place on the edge of cliffs.
Instead, these loosely defined (but still easily navigable) tracks offer multiple routes, each suited towards a given vehicle class. These routes are generally split up into a muddy trough through the middle for the big boys, and thin, rocky trails for the more nimble vehicles, with the rule of thumb being that the bigger you are, the closer to the ground you drive.
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| Source // MobyGames |
In many cases, the only thing stopping me from a collision wasn't smart, often early use of the handbrake, but the use of the boost. A well-timed spurt of boost can help you turn a corner you wouldn't otherwise be making, and you've got as much regenerating boost as you'd like, so long as you don't use too much of it at once - then your engine will catch fire, and you'll explode and lose more positions.
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| Source // PlayStation |
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| Source // PlayStation |
Frustrations
While there is a great variety of vehicles, with more getting unlocked as you make progress, and each with a few skins to choose from (though they all end up muddy and/or destroyed, so don't worry too much about the lack of them), you might find the tracks and maybe even music get a little repetitive after a while.
To mitigate that a little, each event pushes you to use a specific vehicle type, so that you'll get to experience a track with a truck, and then a couple of events later come back to it with a buggy, because you'll go through it a slightly different way this time around.
There are some changes in time of day, too, so the look and feel of a circuit can change in those regards, but when you're never quite sure what the events on the next ticket you'll race on are, there's no real looking forward to what's coming up.
Progress is solely down to getting enough points to unlock new tickets, on which are events to get more points to get more tickets. The tickets come in order, the events on them might as well be done in order, and because they scale up in difficulty, you might as well do all the events to complete a ticket before moving on anyway.
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| Source // PlayStation |
When the game is in motion, you don't really care about the lack of options you have for just having the kind of fun you want - luckily because you're often having fun with whatever you've been told to have fun with. When your favourite track comes on and your rally car is skirting along the edge of a cliff at insane speeds, where a single bump can spell disaster, you don't mind not being on a track of your choice.
When it's not in motion, it's loading, and you start to see its age, and how you're along for the ride that we put you on, not necessarily the exact ride you want.
After completing four or five tickets, one race saw me in a comfortable lead, only for an almost inevitable crash into a rock. Crash hard enough and you explode, watch a Burnout-style slow-mo, and reset to the track a fair few positions down and try again. This time, I was caught in such a way that the game didn't think "he needs a reset here", and there's no option for a quick reset either. My only choice was to try to get out of this position by wiggling, or by using too much boost so that I'd explode.
I went from first to last with that single mistake, and as it was on the last lap, some 6 minutes into a race, you can imagine the deflated feeling I got. But that's racing. You win some, you lose some. At least it looked good, right?
Final Word
MotorStorm was one of my first PlayStation 3 games, as it probably was for many who perhaps bought it based on that E3 trailer that surely couldn't be in-game footage, could it? It wasn't, but the attitude it had was more or less met in the game itself. You could indeed churn up the circuit and reduce it to a giant mud puddle, and you bet you could kill motorcycle riders by nudging them off track.
It was fun, and it was the kind of fun that you couldn't find elsewhere - in my case, especially, with no other consoles or PCs to play FlatOut on. It was a racing game that just let you enjoy a bit of carnage. Annoying when you were on the receiving end of it, sure, but fun while it lasted.
For me, I know it lasted a good while. I plugged away at it, unlocking more and more stuff, even going into a few online races if memory serves. Sadly, I don't have any save data for it, or can't find any at least. Not that I could use it to select a track and vehicle of my choosing and just go and race.
While it was arguably never a massive series, there were sequels that this 1001 list will have us take a look at, and to spoil that a little, I never played them at the time. I don't know why. Probably because they weren't as important to me as the next Metal Gear or Assassin's Creed or something. And knowing that the series is now effectively dead, that's a bit of a shame.
There was something magical in MotorStorm. It wasn't perfect, it could be bettered, but if it was all you had, you had a blast. I could easily have kept playing it, 13 years later, until I really did hit my skill ceiling. Yeah, the soundtrack was getting repetitive, yes, you can see some of the iffy graphics here and there, and by god yes, some of the handling was a pain in the arse, but I still had a good time.
I'm not sure how people who didn't play it at launch will see it, though. Hopefully, with a smile at least.
Fun Facts
You never see them in action, but tracks that take place on the top of mesas often have cargo helicopters and cranes dotted around to lift those unfortunate drivers back up from the plains below.
MotorStorm, developed by Evolution Studios, first released in 2006.
Version played: PlayStation 3, 2007, also via teenage memories.