Preview: Hands-On Trick-Based Racer Pure

Sat, Aug 23, 2008

It's not hard to pick Pure out of this year's Disney Interactive video game line-up. Maybe it's the grown-up look... maybe the inclusion of ATVs... maybe the conspicuous lack of Hannah Montana. Or, maybe, it's simply because Pure is not quite like anything any video game publisher, let alone Disney, has ever produced.

Yes, Pure is an ATV racing game. But by borrowing the finest points of games like SSX, Pure is also an extreme sports game. As a Disney title, Pure is incredibly easy to pick up and play -- but it's also surprisingly deep. Find out what I mean after the jump.

Developed by Disney's UK-based Black Rock Studios (formerly known as Climax Racing, and responsible for THQ's MotoGP and the later ATV Offroad Fury games) Pure is first and foremost a solid ATV racer with spot-on controls, set in beautiful environments modeled on real-world locations. But as you've no doubt surmised from the screenshots above, those real-world locations don't just feature the occasional hill -- they drop you off the edge of cliffs that would make Evel Knievel himself jealous.

With all the air you'll be getting, there's plenty of time to pull off crazy tricks and rack up points during each decent; and as virtual skateboarders and snowboarders might expect, it is here that Pure's first level of strategy is to be found. Do you go for broke, and risk chaining tricks together to create killer combos? Do you simply hold a trick midair for greater control? Or, over those smaller jumps where you're only getting -- let us say, one or two double-decker buses worth of hang time -- do you play it safe and not trick out at all?

Due to a particularly intuitive trick control scheme where you simply press one of three face buttons and choose a direction on the analog stick to bust out death-defying stunts, those are pretty much the only questions you'll be asking yourself midair -- but considering how much your midair success influences your chances on the ground, there's plenty of pressure to perform. Every time you land a trick, Pure gives you more precious boost (and, in the game's Freestyle mode, fuel) that you can then immediately expend to gain a burst of speed.

Or not... because your boost meter doubles as your trick meter. The more boost you save, the more difficult, spectacular and rewarding stunts you'll be able to perform -- and the faster your boost will accordingly rise.

But then again, boost can also be used right before a jump to get even more air, to perform more tricks and gain even more boost. And the lovely part is while all this might seem like a tricky balancing act in print (and at a competitive level, it might be) the reality I encountered was that all the balancing is done behind the scenes, to ensure that the multitude of ways to use boost simply provide for multiple correct approaches to racing.

At the multiplayer press event where I picked up Pure for the very first time, I first tried to milk every jump, no matter how small, for a little bit of boost -- and then use that boost to immediately catch up to the competition. It worked; but I soon found conserving boost for more powerful tricks worked just as well.

Unlike most racing games, Pure features sweeping changes in elevation throughout its real-world tracks, and if you properly preload the suspension, you can pull off tricks over even the smallest of jumps. But after watching me struggle to pull out of 11th place in an online match against fellow journalists, game director Jason Avent explained that as I became more experienced, I wouldn't necessarily want to.

"If you're flying through the air, your wheels aren't on the ground. If your wheels aren't on the ground, you're not accelerating," Avent said. "So what you want to try and do, when you get really good -- and this really is an advanced thing -- you need to know when to do tricks, when to get boost, when not to."

By tapping the brake right before smaller jumps, he explained, you can gently hop right over them... and then while competitors are still in the air, haul ass to the finish line. It's not always a winning strategy -- "if you really want to go clear over maybe bumpy ground or three or four jumps to land on a downramp, you want to boost jump," he said -- but then again, no single technique really is. While arcade-y physics mean that players have far more leeway to react to the tracks in real time, there's always an advantage to knowing the terrain -- and in Pure, that terrain is three-dimensional.

When I had difficulty pulling around a particularly tight corner, I asked Avent for some advice. After he explained that the brake was my friend (and indeed it was; a quick tap help set up a nice, showy drift), he said something I won't soon forget.

"There's lots of ways of taking the corners," he said, "but then you've actually got to think about sequences of corners... and you've got to think of the bumps and jumps in the track like they're corners. You've got the two-dimensional left and right but also you've got the distance to deal with, which kind of adds an extra dimension to the racing. So you've kind of got a three-dimensional racing line."

I've heard the phrase "add an extra dimension" more times than I care to count; but perhaps for the first time, the description was entirely apt -- and gets right to the heart of what makes Pure different. Where other racers take place mainly on a plane, Pure draws on the conventions of extreme sports titles to render an experience that not only has 3-D graphics, but allows you to engage the terrain in 3-D as well, jumping over (and under) obstacles, taking drifts and drops in sequence while trying to stay on the dirt track.

While I wasn't able to evaluate the single-player AI, and didn't get quite enough hands-on time with the game's non-standard racing modes to properly comment (Sprint is a slightly more realistic racing mode with smaller tracks and fewer jumps, while Freestyle pits players against their own fuel tanks, requiring constant trickery to maintain momentum as the precious liquid drains away) I had a great time finding the best routes, jumps and uses of boost in the game's 16-player online racing mode; and was impressed by the wide array of licensed parts from which players can actually build (not just customize) their quads for style and performance.

Pure ships September 16th, and arrives in stores September 23rd, for PS3, Xbox 360 and PC.