- The Island – A brand new radically different location for the festival.
- The Monster Truck – An all new vehicle class added to the core vehicle selection for a total of 8 different vehicle classes.
- Immersive Online Experience ¿ A radical re-look at the whole MotorStorm online experience, focusing on ease of use and breadth of gameplay all while tearing it up in races up to 16 players.
- Improved Actions – A new level of control; punch, duck and ram using a new control layout.
- New Rating Systems – It¿s not all about winning; it¿s also about how you perform.
Amazon.com Product Description
The first Motorstorm wowed fans with its heady formula of brutal, unpredictable off-road racing, festival vibes and stunning Monument Valley desert scenery. Now, Motorstorm Pacific Rift takes you to a solitary tropical paradise in the Pacific Ocean, ready for a whole new take on no-holds-barred racing action through thick swamps, dense jungle, towering peaks and steaming volcanoes. Unleash the storm again
If you tend to buy the first MotorStorm to get yourself familiar with the game than drop this idea. As good as the original MotorStorm is, it’s no comparison to its sequel. MotorStorm: Pacific Rift is a great racing game, but more than just a racing game. The game was improved with even more alternative routes when racing. The graphic is excellent, and the interactions with objects such as smashing into a branch are more accurate. MotorStorm: Pacific Rift is also more realistic such as water cooling off your boost, and smaller vehicles not able to go to certain routes such as deep water.
MotorStorm: Pacific Rift has about 80 races, or more. All categorized into four distinct parts of the island: Earth Zone (basic land fields), Air Zone (expect lots of jump lifts), Fire Zone (lava lands), and Water Zone (beach etc). You will find about twenty-four races in each of the four zones. Some are basic races, some timed races, and some eliminator races where racers are being eliminated while racing (you don’t want to be in the back).
You will also obtain points, and gain PS3 trophies for your performances in the game. Unlike its predecessor you are able to play in split screen with your peers if you have additional controllers. One of the many extras in MotorStorm: Pacific Rift is your ability to take pictures of your race (pause, and snap). The good thing about this feature is that you’ll be able to snap a picture on any angle since you’ll be able to move, zoom in and out, before snapping your pictures that will all be saved in your gallery. MotorStorm: Pacific Rift also has an improved online gaming where you can text/voice/video chat, and invite your PS3 friends who also own the game.
Cons: unfortunately absent in both the first, and Pacific Rift, there are no replays of your race. Hopefully this will be present if they make a third, but this shouldn’t be a reason not to buy this game.
Rating: 5 / 5
When the first motorstorm came out it carved its own racing type. It was one of the pioneers in physics based racing. With every track having lots of branching path, every branch suitable for a different class of vehicles.
Here they have taken it to the next level. Races are much bigger. Apart from mud you also have other obstacles for individual vehicles classes. Small vehicles will get stuck in plants and other terrestrial hazards. This time it is lot more than physics. Some people are complaining that vehicles slide more than the first one, it is intentional as it forces you to use hand brakes for a faster drift turn. Overall sense of speed has drastically gone up.
This game is still Motorstorm at heart. They have added tonnes and tonnes of extras to the game to make it feel very fresh. Things like lava tracks, water jets for faster cooling, high air jumps all add extra strategy. It is not just driving fast. You have to try out all the alternative paths and choose right one based on boost and cooling requirements.
So many behind the scene changes
– Explosions will destroy the guys next to you. You can do kamikaze on cliff edges.
– If you are small vehicle you can lap behind a big one to clear off the vegetation and pull off at the last second.
– Water shower is available only in paths that have more terrestrial danger for balancing. Either it is a rocky path or volcanic eruption.
More and more I play, I keep finding lot more interesting tweaks.
AI is also vastly improved. If you truly race well you will win. There isn’t much of rubber necking. I also think the physics respond much better compared to the first one. Jumps and slides feel lot more natural. Graphics seem to be better than the demo. I think they have tweaked the xdr lighting. Every thing looks very polished. I havent seen any crashes or hangs.
There is twice as many race tracks as the original one. There is also an extra eliminator mode. Speed events are my favorite, it is like slalom race. Where the flags appear only after you cross the current one. So it requires lot more agility than just boosting the way through. It is like the old ATV games.
After play thing for an hour or so, when I tried MS1 it was a night and day difference. The new game also loads much much faster than the old one. The vehicle selection screen is lot more slicker and avoids the double loading screen. I love the fact they have added split screen. There is nothing more fun than pushing your buddy off the cliff. Using L1/R1 as action buttons makes the game much more fun.
Hope they keep us busy with more DLCs.
Rating: 5 / 5
I love racing games. I love being able to go fast, tearing up the track, and I love that when (not if) I wreck, I can almost feel the pain of it. MotorStorm: Pacific Rift does all these things, and then some. Going fast is just one part of the game, but you do literally tear the track up. Tire tracks get left in the mud and in the dirt or sand, old structures can get driven through and create new hazards for other vehicles, and, of course, the wrecks are bone crunching and make me squirm when they happen. The game takes place on an abandoned tropical island in the Pacific. Having once been populated by man, there are structures there depicting different times it has been occupied. From World War 2 era bunkers and airfield, to a lava overrun beach town, to an abandoned mountaintop observatory. The elements play havoc to your vehicle as well. Bikes and smaller vehicles will has a harder time negotiated the mud and dense brush but can make up time with there acceleration, while big rigs and Monster trucks can tackle pretty much any terrain and take abuse, but sacrifice speed over durability. Also, water and fire have an effect on the boost gauge of your chosen ride. get to close to fire and lava the boost will heat up faster, making an engine explosion more eminent, while driving through water will cool your boost down, but might hurt your speed. All in all, the game is very well made, very fun and if you’re a racing fan with a PS3, this is certainly a game to pick up.
Rating: 5 / 5
I couldn’t wait to buy this game. Every trailer seemed better and better.
I played the original and wasn’t too impressed: There was nothing done to incur a sense of speed in the original, and there was no split screen multiplayer. The crashes were the highlight, however.
Pacific Rift fixes both of those problems completely. They’ve increased the sense of speed by adding more effects and a fish-eye lens, and its a significant improvement. This time around there is split screen multiplayer for up to four players. Two would have satisfied me…
Another huge improvement are the environments. They are gorgeous, probably some of the best looking I’ve seen to date. You’ll drive underneath waterfalls from a mile high that cover the screen in water affects and obstruct your vision, but cool of your engine, you’ll jet through forests at incredible speeds, slog through valleys of mud, and pass over pits of lava on an active volcano. The environments are categorized as follows: Earth, Air, Fire, Water. The earth environments tend to place you in caverns mud, and thick forests; air tend to place you high up in the mountains where you’ll get up to seven or eight seconds of airtime through unbelievable cliffs; fire will take you over active volcano landscapes that heat up your engine as a hazard; while water environments tend to place you near a beach or running rivers. Just look at the screen shots for the unbelievable scenery.
The crashes are as phenomenal as ever. In one race I played a lightweight rally car, and the last fifteen cars were either monster trucks or heavyweight mudpluggers (hummers/armored personnel carriers). The monster trucks would fight one another, and form swirling masses of destruction if they toppled over, and made for some amazing survival drive sequences. There are other races, such as bike-only races, where drivers flip each other off, taunt each other, and hit one another off of their bikes. There are so many ways to enjoy the game. If you get bored of playing a rally car and trying to speed as fast as you can, you can switch to big rig and just run people over or smash them into things. If you get bored of that, you can be a motorcycle against only monster trucks and try to survive… its up to you.
The farther you get in the singleplayer, the tougher the AI becomes. Toward the end, I found it more important to stay alive than to actually win the race, an example being the monster trucks above. The Ai will become more aggressive and smash into you. While it is at times frustrating, their aggression causes even more crashes and spontaneity.
There are eight or so difficulty levels in the singleplayer, and winning races within specified requirements earns you points and new vehicles, driver skins, and extras (such as concept art). In a singleplayer race, there are sixteen cars instead of twelve. Online mode only supports twelve though.
Online is fantastic. Online mode places you into games with other players of similar skills, or at least tries. When first starting, I found the races to be the easiest because I already completed the singleplayer before hand. There are five or so online player ranks, and the later ranks require you to place within the top three positions if you want to increase at all, so it becomes extremely difficult. At veteran difficulty, you’ll actually lose ranking points if you don’t place high enough, so it places every racer into their own category, which I thought was interesting and intuitive.
The replay value is very high. There’s a custom game mode where you can set the cars, tracks, and time of day for yourself… something that should have been included in the original.
Out of ten points, I give MotorStorm: Pacific Rift a 9.5… the original being a 7.5 due to one type of environment, lack of speed and multiplayer options. Pacific rift fixes all of these problems, and I highly recommend you buy it if you own a PS3.
Rating: 5 / 5
There are some excellent reviews here, but I’ll give some additional input from my week of owning this game. First, the graphics are better, but not leaps better. It’s more of a different environment in my opinion that makes it look better than the original MS (I mean, how great can you get rocks, dirt, and mud to look?). Here, there is actual water texture that looks very realistic, both on the ground and falling from waterfalls. Driving through water or the falls will inhibit your visibility. In addition, lava scenes show heat refracting the light and distorting the ground and visibility, and the foliage is also outstanding and adds a sense of visual candy as well. These environmental factors really show off the graphics engine of the PS3.
Second, driving the vehicles themselves shows an improvement more towards the realism side. They tend to “push” more in turns and you need to learn to use the brake for straight-away braking and the e-brake for turns (“push” meaning the vehicle tends to want to go straight and doesn’t respond well to steering input). Speed and braking management are crucial in this game unlike the original where you could just pretty much tear your way through tracks wide open.
Third, the idea of having four separate zones with each one having 20 or so challenges/races to complete offers a nice changeup to the original MS, which was much more linear in that you just graduated from one ticket to another with four different tracks/vehicles on each successive ticket. With MSPR, you can change to a different track of your choosing when you get tired of one zone and want a change of scenery. But the basic idea of the original MS graduating through four skill levels remains the same.
Fourth, the online gaming option is more limited as others have mentioned. Gone is the capability to scan through races and choose what you want. I suspect that this was partially to prevent “cherry pickers” who would scan races for easy pickings on n00bs and an easy win to up their ratings (yes, you “Gods” out there from the first one know who you are).
Lastly, let’s give it up to a PS3 racing game that you can actually share with your friends on the same couch! When you have friends over or you take the box to your friend’s house, it’s just not real fun having them watch you play or you watch them take a turn and play. This was one of my early peeves about the PS3 racing game offerings – if you wanted to race a friend, he had to have his own machine at home and you raced him online. In my opinion, a large part of the fun of owning a console is competing with your buddy side by side, isn’t it? And for anyone who never purchased the first game and considering it first before this, don’t bother. The first several races in all four zones are easy enough for any green MotorStormer and you’ll advance after practice.
Rating: 5 / 5