The world of MotorStorm is a racing and music festival that travels the world to find the crazies places to races almost all types of race machines. For MotorStorm Apocalypse this place is an unnamed American city which is experiencing earth quakes on an apocalyptic scale. Everyone has evacuated the city. All that remains are the remains of sky scrapes, fly overs, homes and some crazy mofos who wanna race.

Festival Mode

The story is very much what you'd expect from a racing game, simple. It's split into three parts that take place simultaneously over the three day festival of MotorStorm. Rookie, Pro and Veteran. Each has it's own little plot that overlap slightly but is nothing more than distraction to make the game seem longer. The stories all follow the same structure, you become a character, you have a personal battle with something or someone, race, cut scene, race, cut scene,...,  the end. Stepping away from the individual characters you play there's the festival that's going on (on an aircraft carrier) and a war between MotorStorm, Dustlite and the Crazies. Dustlite are a private military company who are hired to look after the city. Complete non-sense when you see the city in ruins from day one. The Crazies are the people who didn't evacuate. I like to compare the Crazies to zombies, they are there just to be ran over. All three of the sides hate the other two, so when racing you're always under fire directly or indirectly. The "story" will keep your attention for only a few seconds at a time. Luckily the story is told using animated comic strips which are quite entertaining. In any case, does anyone buy a racing game for the story? It fills in the gaps between races nicely, giving your throttle finger a rest.

When it comes to the racing MotorStorm deliveries. The broken city setting provides a fantastic variety of tracks (and routes within each track) to make each race different. On top of that the city is moving. The quakes are happening all the time, causing buildings to topple, roads to collapse and be forced upwards and pretty much everything else explodes. All these events happen in a scripted way but I've noticed not always at the same point. Some events will just be visual but others will change the track by blocking off routes or revealing new ones in the debris. There's also a war raging around you. Helicopters and harriers over head, and soldiers and tanks on the ground. They all shot at you with machine guns and RPGs, another source of explosions. Early on in the game these shots won't do anything but as you get further in they can cause you to explode if you've maxed out your boost. Helicopters regularly crash on the track, like the scenery, causing routes to be blocked and revealed. Putting all these events together makes MotorStorm looks spectacular. 

While dealing with the ever changing environments you also have to contend with 15 other races through out the story mode. Pretty much every race has a mix of vehicle types, ranging from motorbikes to super cars and quad bikes to big rigs. 

MotorStorm's races can be greatly satisfying or ridiculously infuriating. Unlike most racing games, contact is not only allowed but makes up 90% of the strategy for each race. The other 10% being split between "shall I go left, right or straight on?" and timing your boosts. The frustration in MotorStorm comes from the other racers. If you think you can stick to a racing line, you are wrong. The other racers will have something to say about that and will act. So, always be prepared to take an alternate route. Take this as an example: imagine you're in first place, you're driving your pick up truck superbly, then a motorbike on full boost smashes straight into the back of you, goes under your truck, you to lose all control and you crash. It happens all to often. The AI seems to have no sense or desire to win.  It's like they are programed to crash into you and take away your glory. Which to be honest is how it should be in MotorStorm, they've done it right, but when it happens it doesn't half piss you off.

The racing in the story mode aren't all that hard really. Gaining the position to progress is easily done on the first or second attempt. A few more attempts may be required to get first on every race or to pick up all the MotorStorm playing cards. Apart from the straight out racing, there is the elimination mode. It's simple, whoever is in last place is eliminated every 15 seconds until there's one man standing. 

Beyond The Story and Multi-player

The story mode isn't too long but is plenty long enough. After completing the story there is surprisingly a lot more to do. For every race you won in the story you unlock hardcore mode, involving harder competitors and target time. Also, there's time trials for each track. Weekly challenges and downloadable events make up the rest. Weekly challenges provides 3 new time limited challenges per week and downloadable events (there's 7 in total and 4 are free to download from the PS Store) which have several races each. Most of the offline game modes let you earn coins to level up which I'm assuming unlocks items for customising your vehicles.  Unfortunately, at this moment in time it seems there's no one playing online. That's a shame because it doesn't allow me to review this aspect of the game and I remember the original MotorStorm's online multi-player being quite fun. 

Overall MotorStorm is a great racing game. I wouldn't have paid full price for it but it's an absolute bargin second hand.