Pure is a solid first entry in a [potentially] new franchise.
The only vehicles in the game that you'll be able to ride are ATVs. That's not as bad as it would initially seem because you can build your own from scratch. A-arms, frames, engines, seats, wheels, tires, and nosecones are just some of the parts you'll be able to customize. The parts will affect your ride's performance as well as the way it looks. You'll constantly unlock new parts because you'll be rewarded after every race. You will see which part you unlocked after the race but you have to go back into the garage menu and cycle through every single category to find the part you won, and then decide if that part improves upon your bike's strengths. If you have more than one ATV then you'll need to do that process more than once. It would've been far less tedious if something came up as soon as you won the race to tell you "this part will give you +2 acceleration, equip now?" What I'm talking about is some sort of auto-equip feature. It's very much needed.
One of the other problems is that you don't have many options to choose from when you want to customize the appearance of your ATV. There are very few colors and decals to decorate your bike with. It's extremely shallow compared to just about any other racing game out there that lets you control how your vehicle looks.
In an extreme sports game like this you would probably expect the soundtrack to feature a lot of fast paced and energetic rock/metal songs to get your blood pumping. Pure goes in the opposite direction which means that the soundtrack is a total throw-away. What Pure's soundtrack mostly consists of is boring electronic music written by no-name artists. Even if the songs were good it wouldn't matter because electronic music doesn't belong in a game like this. It's basically the equivalent of hearing Britney Spears songs in a Zelda game.
As bad as the soundtrack is…the graphics mostly make up for that. The riders and ATV's are immensely detailed and all of the trick animations are wonderfully done. There are a lot of massive ramps to jump off of and when you're in the air you can see buildings, water and forests as far as the eye can see. It's also worth noting that thick mud deforms beautifully as you tread on through it. It's not the most impressive looking mud out there but that's not that big of a deal. The only blemish is some semi-frequent texture pop-in on some of the trees.
The one thing that Pure does exceedingly well is the gameplay. You are encouraged to do big tricks because they will earn you boosting power. You will only be able to do small tricks at first but as you acquire more boost you can then do bigger tricks. The A button does beginner tricks, B does intermediate tricks, Y does advanced tricks and the two shoulder buttons will do special tricks. (such as the air guitar trick that I mentioned earlier) You'll not always care about doing big tricks because you can use your boosting power to make you go really fast for a limited amount of time, but if you do that for a long time then you'll lose the ability to do some of the big tricks. This leads to some strategic depth because sometimes you'll want to hold on to your boost power to save up for a big trick and sometimes you'll want to use a lot of boost power to go fast because you're loosing a race real bad.
The game advertises that there are three game-types but there are basically only two and a half. Race, sprint and freestyle. Race is self explanatory, sprint is basically the same as race except the courses are much shorter and narrow, and freestyle has you doing tricks which will string into combos. It's similar to something like the Tony Hawk games. As you do a trick this little timer will appear and if you do a trick before it runs out, your points multiplier will go to x2 and then to x3, x4 and so on.
The online play is basically the same as the offline portion which is a disappointment. You can play all two and a half game-types online but there's nothing special about it. There's no ranking system, the load times are long, and people aren't penalized for quitting early. It would've been better if the developers made more of an effort by putting in a large amount of exclusive game-types or courses for online play
It's worth mentioning that online play is the only kind of multiplayer that Pure has. There are no split-screen or system link functionalities of any kind. In this day and age every competitive game should have at least one or the other. It was a stupid idea to include neither.
As a result of that, Pure is not a game that I can recommend as a purchase because the offline world tour mode is the only thing worth your time. It'll make a great rental but there's nothing in Pure that'll keep you coming back for more than a week. Thanks for reading.