Consolation Prize

In between playing Castle Crashers, which seems to have been dominating my gaming habits recently, I took some time out from creature bashing to try out the latest race game offering: Pure from Blackrock Studios.

Instead of road or track racing - which seems to be the more dominant racing variant on the Xbox 360 with titles like Forza Motorsport 2, GRiD, and PGR4 - Pure instead spins its wheels off-road featuring Quad bikes, unfeasibly huge jumps, and the ability for the rider to perform a variety of crazy tricks.

The demo features a tutorial level and three laps of the “Mount Garda” course. The tutorial is quite rudimentary and is basically just an oval, but it does provide the basis for an introduction to the controls and on how to perform tricks. However the actual race course itself is a far more interesting affair with branching routes, varying terrain, and a total number of 16 competitors all vying for position.

The ability to perform tricks feels like it’s going to play a big part in Pure and on approach to what looks like a convenient place you will need to “pre-load” your jump - by holding back on the left joystick and flicking the stick forward as you hit the jump - to enable you to get more air time. Once airborne, tricks are performed via the directional placement of the right joystick in combination with a button press that represents the difficulty. “A” for example performs the easiest manoeuvres and then “B” and “Y” are used to perform the more increasingly difficult tricks respectively.

However, before you’re left wondering as to the reason why you wouldn’t always perform the hardest stunts, I should explain that in order to access the more death defying, and naturally more visually impressive tricks, you firstly have to fill the “Thrill Bar” to the required level. This “Burnout” like meter gradually fills upon successfully landing a series of tricks but can also be burned to provide a speed boost, this is of course at the expense of being able to perform the very best tricks if you deplete the meter too much, and thus this provides a nice game dynamic as the player needs to make a judgement call between speed versus tricks as they race around the track.

Pure sits comfortably in the “arcade” sub-class of the racing genre. It’s fast paced, is a breeze to control, and from what I can see runs at a fair lick without a hint of frame-rate slowdown. The demo track was enjoyable to race around, even if I didn’t have time to appreciate the luscious scenery as it sped past. Petrol heads will certainly get a kick out of Pure and the prospect of up-to 16 players online is certainly very enticing.

The Pure demo is available from Xbox Live Marketplace (1.3 GB).

I’ve played through the demo a few times and the graphics are gorgeous plus it is easy to controls which is a + for me. I’m really looking forward to it.