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The core experience of Pure is whipping around gorgeously realized dirt roads, boosting at the end of the turn to send your ATV careening towards a jump, doing a little showboating in the air, and hitting the ground racing. Your customized ride controls well, especially near the end of the tour when you have all the parts and upgrades unlocked. Most of the time you'll be gunning the engine and drifting around corners, keeping you eyes peeled for the shortcuts and better routes, before holding back to pre-wind before you hit the ramp. Getting air isn't just to launch you ahead of the pack here, though. There's an entire trick system, with four levels of increasingly more difficult stunts to pull off to earn you boost. The boost itself is a little disappointing. I was expecting the rocket thrust of Burnout, but it's only a minor speed increase, and won't save you in a race if the lead rider isn't still in sight.
Pure is fantastic as a causal game when you just want to get in a little fun before work.
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Race seems to be the main mode of the game, but it's the least fun. Sprint is bare knuckle riding. Short tracks with few jumps, and a pack of sixteen riders jockeying for position, where winning is all about perfection. Freestyle makes full use of the trick system, and loads the tracks up with extra ramps and various power-ups that boost your scoring potential. Here it doesn't matter who crosses the finish line first. You have a limited amount of fuel, and you have to make the most of it by making the most insane tricks you can pull off, chaining them together to form massively scoring combos. There's nothing more satisfying than hitting all the right jumps to build your combo meter up, and finish it off jamming in mid-air for an impossible leap over a grand canyon. Race attempts to combine the two with giant tracks and big jumps, but the focus on getting to the finish line first. Since you lose a little control when you're tricking, there's very little point in using more than the first or second level stunts beyond each map's one great leap. You also must find the quickest route, which isn't always easy to locate when going out of bounds is an automatic crash, and these boundaries aren't marked. Also in racing, if you're behind by the first lap, you might as well restart, because it's nearly impossible to catch up with the leader. While taking the lead early normally leaves the other riders as no more than dots on the radar. It's not all that exciting.
There is no split screen play, but there is online play for up to sixteen riders. That brings the intensity back into racing, with little or no lag to spoil the bone crunching collisions. Though the fact that there's no way to limit the ATVs by racing class means you're going to need to complete all of World Tour to get all of the parts, and jack up your ride to even have a chance of keeping up with the online pack. Free race and time trials rounds out the package, complete with online leaderboards to show off your skill. There's also the far too detailed ATV customization, where half the part categories are strictly for looks, and half of those are too small to see in the actual game. Obsessive fans might tinker after every race, but with the option of automatically building the best either trick or racer ride, I don't think most people will bother. Another pointless inclusion is the choice of riders, who have their own batch of special stunts and add inane chatter during the race, thankfully having its own volume setting. The soundtrack is some pulse pounding stuff perfect for a close race, and customizable to your heart's content.
Pure is fantastic as a causal game when you just want to get in a little fun before work. The loading times are blazingly fast, while restarts during the race are instantaneous. While the tracks do look lush, with swaying trees and sparkling water, I would have sacrificed the graphical edge for double the framerate. A solid thirty frames per second doesn't quite have the same sense of speed found in the likes of Forza 2, but it's still a fun ride. |
