The lights are on, but nobody's home

User Rating: 7.4 | MotorStorm PS3
By b_wilcox | Review Date:
MotorStorm falls far short in its bid to become the PS3's showcase game of the first half of 2007. Oh, it's pretty and you'll find yourself amazed by the detail of the skies, the tracks, and the racers...but once that wears off, you feel quite cheated. It's like getting a date with the most gorgeous girl in school, and finding out after about 30 minutes of small talk that she's a complete drip. This analogy is probably misplaced in a gaming review considering that most console jockeys can't relate, but nevertheless.

What MotorStorm has in style--and it has it in spades, no doubt--it is doubly lacking in substance. Online play will be the only saving grace for a game that has only a few tracks and a very spotty career mode. And never has Sony's decision to forsake rumble force feedback in the SIXAXIS looked so bad--you'll be surprised just how much you miss the ol' vibrations when you're bouncing over rocky crags and getting literally nothing tactile from the experience.

This isn't to say that MotorStorm is a poor game. It has its fun moments and this is certainly a better-laid foundation for a franchise than many others before it. For a while, I enjoyed the gimmickry of the game. But there's just not a lot of staying power in this title, and when you consider that Blu-Ray discs can hold so much raw data and that the game costs $60, it's just really disappointing to know that a lack of depth is MotorStorm's greatest failing.

***CAVEAT: If subsequent downloadable content is free or inexpensive, and increases the value and depth of the game, I'll add a point to the Value and Tilt columns, making it a 7.9.***

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