Stuck in the Muck
MotorStorm is everything off-road racers should be. And nearly everything they shouldn't.
Published: March 13, 2007
And then you hit that halfway mark and it all starts to go to shit. First, you start to become over-familiarized with the soundtrack's meager offerings. Then you begin to notice you've learned most of the shortcuts or routes around a track. Then you realize that having a certain vehicle in that track flat-out sucks. Then you realize vehicles that used to go around you just pretend you aren't there and drive right right you. Then you realize they aren't driving through you so much as gleefully messing with you. And the races get harder. And the monotony sets in.
And then you get to the fourth Stage of races and you want to finish because you're so GD close, but then you start to notice that the game is starting to blatantly cheat, with certain sections of the track allowing vehicles to go faster than you -- even if they're the same vehicle and they aren't using turbo, so you boost to try to keep up, and then they boost and just surge right on past you. Then some bastard decides that 8th place out of 15 is too good for you, so they give you a nudge and send you flipping and exploding back to the end of the pack.
So you say "fine, f it, time to head online and race against people that aren't complete bastards." But ho hoooo, surprise, you find out that the servers are packed with people, which would ordinarily be awesome, because there's a significant chance that your friends are also playing right now (which they are), but guess what? You can't invite them to play in any games you're about to play. In fact, there are no online buddy lists. No block lists. No way to ignore/mute shitheads that bleat with overly-compressed voices in a mess of indecipherable noise. No way to password-lock games so those overly-crowded servers don't let tons of people that aren't your friends into your game before it fills to the 12 player max.
About the online thing the online experience does have is MotorStorm core gameplay, which is, frankly, custom made for insanity. When the people messing with you are actual humans and they want just as badly to get to the front of the pack as you do, it fundamentally changes the experience, and makes it one for the better. All of the physics, the different vehicles, the different paths -- all the things the single-player game was teaching (including, I suppose, temperance) come to bear here, and the first time you see a rookie taking his bike into the mud where a semi or two will soon be following, you almost want to shake your head and pat them on the back.
Or, y'know, give them a little friendly advice via a message, but since the game isn't actually tied into the PSN servers, there's no logging of the people you've played against. Frustrating? Yep, but then that's MotorStorm at its core. Frustrating because it's limited, yes, but also because the potential for the series is just blatantly, in-your-face apparent; the key pieces of the game didn't quite add up to something that's playable all the way through, and there's been talk now of downloadable content that will help thicken up the single-player offerings, but it's still a little bit of a head-scratcher as to why something as simple as a Time Trial Mode wasn't included.
No mirror tracks, no option to easily race offline with all vehicles on a track you like as a means to practice your online game. Yes, Everything tracks are unlocked by playing through the racing tickets, but you still have to contend with the AI at a certain point through the career, and you're locked into one specific track at a time. These are the kind of things that rub me the wrong way about MotorStorm's experience out of the box. For $60, you're simply not getting a next-gen level of game to play around with. DLC might fix many of the issues, but they'd best be free because they should have been in the game to begin with.
If MotorStorm becomes the harbinger of PlayStation 3 titles shipping with less content than they should only to have things bolted back on via microtransactions, it'll be highlighted for all the wrong reasons. If instead it is merely the first iteration of what will become Evolution Studios' flagship PS3 franchise, then MotorStorm is indeed one of the first examples of what the hardware can do post-launch. We'll undoubtedly find out which in the coming months, but one thing is certain: the building blocks to a truly great off-road racer are here, but they just didn't come together in a way that offered serious depth or replayability. Hell, there are likely plenty of folks that will abandon the single-player game altogether and defect to the online aspect, something that could have been capitalized on. There's that damn "could" word again...
