Above: This dude isn't waiting until May 21 to ascend to heaven.
Naturally, when I began my
review of MotorStorm: Apocalypse with a joke about Christ returning before the PlayStation Network does, I was ensuring that PSN functionality would start coming online between the time I filed the piece
and the time it went to press (not to mention well before Judgment Day this Saturday). Oh well. A good line is a good line.
MotorStorm: Apocalypse is not a particularly good game. What's strange and disappointing is that the gameplay hasn't improved in any meaningful way from the first
MotorStorm, which leads me to believe that, unlike what I suspected in
my review of the first game, it was in fact the game that Evolution Studios intended to make.
Despite the different vehicles you can drive, and the strategies available to you on each course, success in
MotorStorm is less about mastering the game mechanics and more about memorizing the racetracks. You can't tell which debris you can smash, and which will smash you. Too many blind jumps launch you directly into a wall. Generally, nothing you learned from the last race will help you in the next one.
In the review, I didn't mention the weak narrative that ties together the game's single-player mode, because, although it is terrible, and has been a source of complaints in a lot of the other reviews I've seen, it is easy to skip -- and skip it I did. But that's not because I think racing games don't need a story. Rather, racing games already have most of the elements you need for a good story.
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