Thanks to the rather unusual decision to only release the Motorstorm Pacific Rift demo to selected e-mail addresses, there will be many who won’t get hold of this demo at the current time (News is it will be released to everyone some time in October - presumably, giving a double-dose of advertising for the game).  However, the question still remains - is Motorstorm Pacific Rift any good?  Does it have big crashes?  Has going to a Pacific Island lost the massive drops, the weird and wonderful terrain that the first one had in spades?

Well, this demo commentary will answer that - but, of course, it’s based on the Demo.  The final game could be nothing like this, so take the comments with a pinch of salt.  That disclaimer over, let’s launch into the commentary.

The first thing you will likely notice is that the loading times are significantly reduced.  Motorstorm sometimes seemed to have to go off to somewhere on the otherside of the world to get its data, leading to immense loading times (And that was just to show the cars!).  Motorstorm 2 (In the demo, at least) seems to have greatly reduced the loading times.

So - how does it look?  Pretty good.  It runs at 720p, and while it doesn’t seem to use antialiasing that I could see, it ran very fluidly, even when there were several cars detonating and crashing on screen.  Some nice touches: The shadowing system is excellent, with things like trees casing shadows that show individual leaves (Although, at present, self-shadowing onto trees does show some artifacting).  Motion blur is used to good effect when you’re on max boost, or when you’re in free-fall.

How does it sound?  The soundtrack - there are a few tracks in the demo, I spotted Jesus built my Hotrod by Ministry, and Show me the Way by Black Tide.  They have managed to get them to play fine without drowning out or being drowned out by the engines, which is quite impressive.  Engines sound OK, though there is a bit of a limit to what you can do with an engine soundtrack.  The familiar boost whine is there, and it’s made slightly more clear when you’re engine is going to go from Boost to Blow by an alarm buzzer.  Some nice touches - if you make a particularly big jump, or hit something hard but not hard enough to destroy the vehicle, the sound will fade for a few seconds as the in-game characters senses reel from the impact.

And the most important question - How does it play?  I’ll put it this way - if you liked Motorstorm, you’ll like Motorstorm Pacific Rift.  The car handling doesn’t appear to have been significantly changed.  The track seems pretty similar to the general Motorstorm track - sadly, the much-vaunted new lava and water features were not on show, neither were the massively-destructible environments.  Trees appeared to shake when you hit them, but they didn’t fall over or collapse.  The track is a dirt-forest track, with several jumps (Including one route that has several seconds of free-fall, leading to a bone-jarring impact with the ground; and an awe-inspiring wipeout if you get it wrong).  Tight routes are perfect for the bikers, precluding the larger vehicles (especially the new Monster Truck) from going through them, except for the suicidally inclined.

Ah yes - the Monster Truck.  Much has been made of this massive behemoth, with trailers and images showing it crushing all before it.  Sadly, in practice, it doesn’t quite live up to its monster name.  In fact, it handles a lot worse than the trucks in the original Motorstorm, at times almost refusing to corner unless you either give it a huge amount of handbrake and boost, or slow to an almost crawl.  However, when you get it right, and the track is open and sweeping, you can get an impressive head of steam up… and woe betide the vehicle that comes infront of those massive wheels!

So - overall, what does this demo tell us about the full game?  Not all that much, really - it should look good, run smoothly, load reasonably quickly, and feature many of the same sort of things that were in Motorstorm.  So, the question really has to be - did you like Motorstorm?

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