Motostorm Apocalypse Adds Cities, Vehicular Manslaughter

Motorstorm Apocalypse, the latest in a popular racing franchise exclusive to PlayStation, is no longer exclusive to its hallmark beautiful locales, supplanting the previous iterations' picturesque landscapes for collapsing skylines and human debris. What used to feel like flipping through the NYTimes travel section, now most resembles the climactic moments in a Roland Emmerich film. Is this the sort of twist the persistently okay racer needed to achieve greatness? Or is Motostorm Apocalypse just capitalizing on its titular trend?

First, it would be unfair to thrash Motostorm for jumping on the apocalyptic bandwagon. The Motstorstom story, so far as it exists, has been long underpinned by social unrest.

Faceless rebels organized Motorstorm's main events - the races. Each new track served as a stop on their Anarchists' Road Show. You could see it in the rare set pieces. Starting and finish lines often resembled ESPN's X-games on human-growth hormones. And "Lunatics Unite" was Motorstorm Pacific Rifts marketing tagline, most memorably applied to a commercial in which cars, bikes and ATVs are dropped from jumbo jets - passengers riding them down at near-terminal speeds.

That said, put old Motorstorm alongside Apocalypse, and the series' hitherto Mountain Dew extremeness goes limp. Here, buildings fall, oceans rise and semis explode. It's the end of the world as we know it, and apparently the races feel fine.

But this world does not, apparently, having gone bananas in its total annihilation. Looters have taken to the streets to do what looters do.  They serve a greater purpose, however, for riders. They're the canon fodder, the human equivalent of mud and rock that beat against your car to show how incredibly powerful the vehicle is.

They are the nearly unavoidable collateral damage of the world's last great joy ride. They're also the best new addition to the Motorstorm franchise, even when compared to the much more expensive to produce collapsing skyscrapers and bursting sewage lines that will no doubt be the game's marketing centerpiece come release.

The people aren't blood-filled water balloons, like the easy-to-pop meatbags in Carmageddon. Nor are they the impossibly nimble pedestrians of Driver. They are ragdolls. Hit them fast and send them over your hood, slow and they're under your wheels. Or, if you get the speed just right, their bodies catch on your hood, riding it like a surfboard - before slipping off and faceplanting into the pavement.

Motostorm Apocalypse is a darker game, not just in its art direction, but also in what it allows the player to do. And rightly so. There's no dissonance between the art, the story and the gameplay. This is the end of the world and we all want to have some good morbid fun - if not now, when?