Maybe this makes me a bad gamer, but I only just got a PS3 about a month ago. I’ve been waiting forever for the price to drop to something I can afford, so when Gamestop offered an 80GB model for $80 on Black Friday, it seems like the perfect time to pick one up. They also had some great deals on used games. I’m not a huge racing game fan, but when I saw the original Motorstorm for only $0.99, I figured what did I have to lose.
Motorstorm has a great gimmick. Take a bunch of different types of vehicles and put them all together on the same track. There are different paths suited to each vehicle, but some of the best moments are when everyone’s stuck together fighting over the same patch of dirt.
The controls are no more complicated than they need to be (accelerate, brake, boost, and steer) and the vehicles all feel good to control. The camera is decent for the most part, but it can sometimes lag behind you on tight turns and once in a while the vehicles behind you can completely block your view. There is also a first person mode that is nearly impossible to play well, but still a lot of fun.
Crashing is a big part of this game, and there’s very little penalty for it. You have to accelerate from zero from the same position you left off, but unless you’re at the very end of the race, it’s not much of a setback. What really kills you is getting stuck on an obstacle and having to back up and turn back onto the track while everyone else zooms past. With the time you lose, you might as well just start the race over.
Despite its flaws Motorstorm is a really fun game, which I why I wish there was more of it. There are only nine different tracks, and while the challenges limiting which vehicles you can use add a little variety, the tracks still get very familiar very quickly. It doesn’t help matters that every single one is the same dusty red-brown. I get what they were going for setting the entire game in Monument Valley, but few different looking locations would have been nice.
What gets even more repetitive is the soundtrack. Apart from the one Slipknot song, there weren’t any tracks that bothered me, and they all fit the tone of the game very well. The problem is that there are only 21 of them. That might sound like a decent number, but when an individual race can last for six or seven minutes, you end up hearing the same songs over and over again.
The loading time isn’t great, but it’s not terrible either. A brief message accompanies the load screen before each race, usually a couple tips for navigating the course. A couple times though you’ll just get some trying-way-too-hard-to-be-cool nonsense telling you not to be a “pusswad” or whatever and then the loading time feels like an eternity.
Surprisingly, there is also no local multiplayer, and since the online servers shut down in 2012, this game is for solo racers only.
From what I’ve read, the sequels fix a lot of the problems I had with the game, including adding splitscreen multiplayer. As for the original Motorstorm, if that lack of multiplayer doesn’t bother you, check if Gamestop has any copies in stock. For only a dollar, it’s well worth keeping an eye out for.
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