MotorStorm RC
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| MotorStorm RC

Evolution Studios - the development team behind MotorStorm RC - is staffed by fools who don't have a rudimentary understanding of economics.

What they're doing is giving you a load of well-designed tracks, tons of vehicles, a whole playground to muck about in, and furiously competitive online leaderboard functionality, with strong presentation and good controls. And they're charging less that five pounds for the lot. Idiots.

Happily, no one's informed them yet of this error in judgment, making MotorStorm RC a very tempting proposition.

Eschewing the ATVs, motorbikes, and trucks of Arctic Edge in favour of radio controlled cars, the game presents you with themed areas based on the main series - Monument Valley, Pacific Rift, Arctic Edge, and Apocalypse.

Big things

There are 16 tracks available, and though that number will increase with the inbound DLC it's more than enough. Each is found under the Festivals play option, where you'll unlock up to three medals per race event after completing the race type's specific requirements.

The most basic of these is the self-explanatory Race mode where you and seven competitors square off.

In Pursuit you must overtake a set number of opponents within a period of time. Drift measures how long you can keep your RC skidding round the track. And Hot Laps is a fancy name for time trials.

It's these man vs milliseconds style events, combined with the game's online functionality, that are crucial to MotorStorm RC's success.

Constantly updated leaderboards let you know your standing among your friends, and thanks to snappy load times and laps that take 15 seconds or less to blaze through the desire to out-compete them is powerful.

Conceptually, the release is very much an ultra-modern R.C. Pro-Am or Micro Machines V3. The action is viewed from above and the controls are simple: accelerate, brake, turn left, turn right, and reset the car to track.

What's new is the constant connection to others' progress, excellent visuals, clean design, and a dirty electronica soundtrack. Otherwise this is classic old skool racing.

No rabbit in a hat tricks

MotorStorm RC contains plenty of horse and carrot unlockables to coax you into improving, with around a hundred variations of over 20 motors to snatch up. Each class of mini-racer performs differently to the others, either pulling off the line quicker, oversteering a little more, or reaching a higher maximum speed.

You can experiment with these at your leisure in the Playground mode, a free-roaming area with skate ramps to jump, basketball nets to leap through, and a small obstacle course of sorts.

Its inclusion is admittedly a bit of a novelty, and there's not a lot to do here. Playground is an underdeveloped section of a game that's otherwise full of potential.

The only other notable omission is the lack of direct competitive multiplayer. The leaderboards go a long way to addressing this, but eight-player face offs would have boosted a great multiplayer experience into the realms of awesome.

But, lest we forget, all this is less than a fiver. MotorStorm RC is superb value for money, and while it doesn't try to reinvent the (miniaturised) wheel, almost everything it includes is highly polished and marvellously compelling when connected to your friend's scores via PlayStation Network.

MotorStorm RC

What appears to be an early '90s throwback racer is, in actuality, an extremely forward-thinking game in terms of simplicity of play, online connectivity, and pricing
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Peter Willington
Peter Willington
Die hard Suda 51 fan and professed Cherry Coke addict, freelancer Peter Willington was initially set for a career in showbiz, training for half a decade to walk the boards. Realising that there's no money in acting, he decided instead to make his fortune in writing about video games. Peter never learns from his mistakes.