Reply To: The Official "Motorstorm Apocalypse" Thread

I haven’t mentioned the game’s single-player element, because honestly, I’m trying to forget it. The game’s “story” mode is an atrocious, dim-witted, utterly unpleasant experience from top-to-bottom. It tries to give copious amounts of context where none is really needed. Do we care about the personalities behind this absurd racing league? I’m guessing not. And yet the mode is replete with talky cutscenes filled with miserably animated “comic-book” art that looks roughly equivalent to Rob Liefeld attempting to draw a Mountain Dew commercial. Every scene draws so heavily from that weird place of hyper-cheesy “extremeness” that so permeated sports culture of the early 2000s that it feels like the game should have just been introduced by a shot of Jonny Moseley positing the question, “What if it earthquaked in San Francisco?” followed by a record scratch, the opening refrain of a Zebrahead song, and a shot of two girls in bikinis eating apocalypse-flavored Doritos.

Were it limited to a single, crappy storyline, maybe it wouldn’t be so bad. But the story mode forces you to trudge through three different stories featuring three increasingly insufferable assholes. Difficulty increases as well, which doubles the drain on your patience as you attempt to slog through this ill-conceived endeavor. On the plus side, the cutscenes are skippable. Again, the load times are not.

So, why isn’t it more fun? For the same reason it looks so great, Apocalypse is frequently a frustrating mess. The on-screen chaos is, at times, indecipherable. Is that piece of freeway that’s jutted outward part of the track? Or an untraversable obstacle? Whoops, before I could figure it out, I exploded. Any number of variations on that theme rear their head throughout the game’s various tracks. There are jumps that aren’t quite jumps; derelict cars that look like other racers, but aren’t; showers of sparks and fire and whatever else that morph into an aesthetically pleasing, if borderline dysfunctional track environment.