If that sounds like a whole lot of gush and hyperbole and you're bracing yourself for a patented IGN.com reality check slap-in-the-face at the end, be assuaged -- Pure gets it very right. There are niggles, but nothing that a well-deserved sequel can't address.
Pure's attention to ATV detail is startling; starting a new game brings you into a very impressive and intuitive assembly line from which to assemble your first set of wheels. The game's developer, Black Rock Studios, has past experience with ATV racing games and it shows -- there's a level of thoughtfulness that Pure exudes in areas like the ATV garage, allowing gamers to adjust the intricate core components of their bike or automatically prefabricate a racing or freestyle (stunts)-optimised ride. If you want to manually trawl through the staggered list of 24 customisation areas (plus colours and textures), you'll find circular menus that break each component down into areas that directly affect your handling, speed, acceleration, boost, tricks and so on.
Pleasingly, it felt like the new components that were unlocked as we progressed through the World Tour mode genuinely had a subtle but direct impact on the areas they were supposed to. If Pure could be said to aim at ATV purists, it's surprisingly adept at nailing a very inviting, arcade approach to racing mechanics. On one side, you have zippy quads that possess excellent physics response to the terrain, making turning a very authentic and intuitive experience. Mastering steering with a Freestyle ATV is a very different experience to that of a Race-tuned ATV, and that is a good thing, frankly.
On the other side of Pure's core mechanics is the stunts. It's an inclusion that, on the surface, could've gone so very, very wrong. So wrong that, in fact, it held the potential to derail the whole game. It's that important and inseparably married to the gameplay. Thankfully, in a gracious nod to SSX, tricks are tied to your top speed and boosting at all times. If you want to sacrifice your top speed, you can boost immediately. Or if you want to try and catch up gradually, perform some tricks over the next three or four jumps and try to max out the trick gauge.
The racers themselves, who are painfully stereotypical (surely they'd be more interested party drugs, premarital sex and hanging out in nightclubs than taking to the hills judging by their garb), also have a special signature move set that is only achievable once you've performed enough of the first three tiers of tricks (which are assigned to A, B and Y on 360, or X, O and Triangle on PS3). Honestly, the game's insistence that you hit both bumpers while boosting to activate this more, rather than just hitting Y twice or something, is definitely more convoluted than it needs to be, given how punishing the pace can be and how much air time is required.
And in the moments that followed, Jim truly knew what it felt like to feel a thigh bone pass through a sternum.
Still, between the racing and the tricking, Pure nails a very tricky balance almost perfectly. The risk of pulling off a complex trick needs to be weighed up against your position in the race, your quad's jump height and how much you have to lose. There are definitely times when the courses force you to really think through how your ATV is set up too -- you'd be hard-pressed to win every event with the same ATV without modifying it significantly throughout the course of the game.
Race, Sprint and Freestyle are the three types of competitions you'll encounter in World Tour mode. Of these, Sprint offers the quickest dose of racing fun on shortened versions of tracks found in the full-scale Race mode. Freestyle is all about the tricks -- you're working towards an overall score, calculated and tweaked by combos and trick complexity. We're grateful for Freestyle's inclusion; it justifies the game's fixation on aerial tricks and breaks up the potential for monotony. Race, as you might have guessed, combines massive courses with a steadily increasing difficulty curve and enough incentives to keep you hooked and progressing.
Powering across mountain ridges, over sandy desert dunes, over rivers and under bridges, Pure takes you through some utterly flooring locations, inspired by treacherous stretches in North America's heartland and plains, New Zealand's snowy peaks, lush jungles, arid valleys, airplane strips, Italian villages, Greek hills and many more. Everything is presented in detail that makes most other engines blush at a framerate that never drops below buttery.
The super-saturated colour scheme is evocative, while light blooming, HDR and incredible incidental details like grass, birds, water droplets, muddy clothes and bikes really complete one of the best looking racers out there, hands-down. MotorStorm: Pacific Rift is going to have to work its butt off to measure up.
The voiceover instructions are a little wearing at times, but these can be skipped through. The soundtrack is excellent, including a couple of Australian names -- Wolfmother and Pendulum -- which is always nice to see in a foreign-produced title. However, with just 25 tracks, you'll want to take advantage of the custom playlist since you'll start hearing repetition after an hour or two of playtime.
There are a few minor issues we hold against Pure. The most notable is a lack of true replay options or the ability to save a replay, for that matter. For such a beautiful and thrilling game to lack a way to store amazing jumps or feats of racing prowess, Pure denies players the ability to really demonstrate those water cooler moments. I suspect there's a small degree of planned obsolescence at work here; such an obvious exclusion points towards a shoo-in feature for a sequel.
While the 15-player online mode is good fun, particularly given that all three core modes are available to be played over the net, where are the player leagues, video and photo transfers or World Tour-style competitions? There's a lot of short-term fun to be had with friends, but nothing to work towards on a global scale, outside of topping the Time Trial tables or scoreboard.
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