Pure Review (PS3)

As you may have already read in my “Pure (PS3) Demo” review, the game is a racing game on ATV bikes and has a feel of Motorstorm and SSX. The craziness of Motorstorm with 16 riders on the track at one time which can be fun, and the tricks you can pull off on the jumps is reminiscent of SSX.

You might notice a difference to this review and this is because I’m going to be doing game reviews from the tech side a bit more to give a deeper account of the game being reviewed.

And what a game to start with!

The opening of Pure has you completing a training session the same as in the demo, and then you have to build your own ATV which is really cool! Then it’s into the game! When you’ve completed a few races and gained some points you unlock extra parts for your bike which helps to improve your ATV.

There’re a few extras in this game to keep you entertained which include up to 10 slots for your ATV’s so you can design different bikes for different races, and with up to 100,000 bike variations, there’s plenty to choose from.

There are three types of races, Sprint which is 5 laps of pure speed (like what I did there) but only a couple of very small jumps, Race which is 3 laps and has jumps in there to give you trick boosts to try and catch your opponents, and then there’s Freestyle with huge jumps and has you trying to get the top score possible. Obviously the more tricks you do, the more score bonuses you get. Freestyle is my favourite race type on the game.

The graphics used in the game are amazing. The background scenery looks like someone has taken a picture of it and stuck it into the game, which really uses what the PS3 has to offer. To say people are saying that the PS3 has yet to hit its full potential is quite scary to think of what the PS3 could actually achieve, but I really can’t see graphics getting anymore photo-realistic for scenery.

To say there can be a lot going on at once in some of the races, the PS3 doesn’t struggle with all that information and graphical power on screen at once which I found quite impressive. It’s like trying to bring down Zeus with a pea shooter.

It’s the little things in this game that add to the atmosphere and shows you how they’ve really thought about the dynamics of the game and what they can do to make it as real as possible, which includes the water effects and the tracks themselves. They’ve done this by using their own in-house engine, Tomcat.

When you ride through the water, it will slow you down a bit, but it’s worth riding through just to see how cool it looks when the water splashes out from the puddles and seems to wet the ground around it. Plus if you drive around a wet track then your clothes and ATV will collect dirt on the way round and make you look like you’ve been racing. If it’s dry, then you’ll get covered in dust.

The tracks are never the same in each race because of how your ATV leaves tracks in the dirt and they stay there throughout the race and this can affect how you turn on dirt. So your first lap might be ok, but you come round again and you might find that you won’t grip to the track as much because you’ve altered the ground.

The harder you turn then the more dirt and dust flies up off the ground which looks really cool.

This is a fun game that will keep you entertained for a good while. There are 7 different places to race around and 48 different tracks which is split across the 3 race types with some having more tracks than others. You could probably go through all the races within a week, but you might have to keep going to finish first in them all. But with this game having the online option, even if you complete the game in record time, it should keep you entertained for quite a while beyond that since there are 16 of you racing at once!!

Pure isn’t as good as Motorstorm in my opinion, but it’s still a great game that I found to be loads of fun. Had it been a bit more chaotic and you’d been able to punch bikers off - that would have made it even more exciting to play!

3 out of 5

Ender

Zath: Remember, if you’d like the chance of winning a copy of this game, be sure to check out the Pure competition that’s currently being held here on Zath!