An arcade style racer should be fun right? There's no need to focus too much on the physics or be too careful about following the best track to go around corners. The whole aim is to drive recklessly and have fun. MotorStorm: Apocalypse succeeds in the fun area, but in the process of having that fun, you'll also get annoyed and frustrated. The main selling point of this game is that the race environments are dynamic. In addition to multiple routes, these routes also change. New ones appear or old ones gets blocked off. This means that one lap may differ to another. This changing environment makes for an interesting race every time and creates the illusion that there is more variety than just the nine locations. Some of the tracks were very cool to race in, like the one on the docks with a heavy storm. It was exciting and the visual effects were impressive. However, this dynamic environment also makes it chaotic. Too chaotic. Oftentimes it was difficult to determine what is part of the track and what is not. Sure, there might be arrow signs that gives a general idea of which direction to go in, but in some of the other levels like with the buildings falling down, I couldn't see that you were supposed to go through a tunnel beneath it and not just turning the corner.
There's just so much going on at the screen at all times that it can be information overload at times. You might not see any hazards on the tracks unless it's too late and you've wrecked. What's annoying is that some of the hazards are impossible to see or you think that it'll be alright driving over it. Conversely, you might see hazards in the distance, but the handling of the vehicles are crap. It would be impossible to turn and get around the hazard, resulting in a crash. Why does this happen? Maybe you're going too fast or whatnot, but the vehicle just does not want to turn when you want it to, it seems the game wants you to crash. That's one of the complaints that I have, it's too easy to wreck your car in this game. There are various disadvantages to wrecking your car. The first and foremost is that it takes a few seconds before you're on the track again ready to race, and in that seconds, you're more than likely to have lost a few places. It might be fun to view the spectacle of crashing when you've just started playing the game, but it gets annoying, real fast, especially when you don't know what happened to cause you to crash.
The game has a story mode of sorts... but I got the digital version which doesn't include all the scenes that tell the story. You're just thrown race after race. Whoever was in charge of this decided it wasn't a good idea to include it for whatever reasons (file size? Incompatibility?), well, let's just say that I'm not impressed that the digital version is a shafted version of the game. Thus, I can't really comment on the quality of the story, but I've read that it's not that great anyway, it's just an excuse for the races. This single player mode gets frustrating at times when you keep losing and can't "qualify" to advance to the next race. The first few races were super easy but then the competition ups itself, and by the time you get to the second story mode (there are three stories here), you can be stuck in some races, restarting again and again and again. It'll drag a 5 minute race into something you'll spend 30 minutes in. Now, if it was just the game being hard and your skill isn't that great, then it's fine by me. I'll be the first to admit I'm not a pro at racing games. But when it's not your fault, that you were going to win, and the game suddenly decides to wreck your car, causing you to lose at the last moment... multiple times, that's when it'll feel like the game is cheating just to artificially extend the game time.
I think they should have implemented various levels of difficulty that you can choose (as in: easy, normal, hard, very hard etc) and change, depending if you were having some trouble at some races or not. Some of the races were extremely annoying to qualify to the next section of the story. Plus, you don't get a choice as to which car you want to use. There are so many opponents in the race, that if you get chosen a weak car that's easy to be wrecked, prepare to be constantly smashed and wrecked. In the latter races, cars would come out of nowhere (behind you) and ram you. It feels like the AI is cheating. No matter what sort of car you have, it would just seem like it's easily wrecked by opponents. However, when you choose the opponent's model, you can't ram anyone like they did to you before and you end up crashing instead. Needless to say, I had some pretty frustrating times playing the story modes. What rewards do I get? Well, none of the satisfaction of a proper story, at least you get a couple of silver and gold trophies out of it. A byproduct of no story screens means that the loading times stand out a lot more. Even though it's around fifteen to thirty seconds long, since there's nothing to do but wait, it feels long after every single race.
This is continued in selecting anything, I wish it could be sped up faster. The game boasts thirteen different classes of vehicles, but some of them feel similar in terms of handling. I'm sure there are subtle differences. One of the best things about this game is that it supports local split screen multiplayer. I was very surprised, since most games just have online nowadays. During split screen, everything is still as smooth as ever, and the online portion of it is fun. The leveling up system works well and the perks are nice. The music is appropriate too, and gives that extra boost in the immersion of the game. The rushes you get when racing at high speed down a track (and managing not to crash) is unparalleled. The graphics are good and there is quite a lot to do in the game. I like all the single player options that you get. It's a solid game if you can overlook the occasional bouts of frustration and the chaotic nature of the game.
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