As we noted, oh, about a month and a half ago, this holiday season is just packed with high-quality, big-budget games, and even if you were to limit yourself to the most gigantic releases available you’d still be dropping a tremendous wad of cash. Even assuming you had the money, there’s still your free time to consider. Where are you going to find the time to play all these games?
In a climate like this, it’s easier than ever for a killer title without name recognition or a cutthroat marketing campaign to slip under the radar — and that’s exactly what we fear will happen to Black Rock Studios’ trick-based racer Pure.
Read on to find out why Pure deserves both your time and money this holiday season, and how you can win a copy at GameCyte for your very own.
If a picture is worth a thousand words, then I could save a considerable amount of time in this review by directing your attention to the image above. That there is the heart of Pure. The guy in the red helmet? That’s you. Jumping off a freaking cliff on your fully-customizable, mud-splattered mean machine. Over a beautiful photo-realistic backdrop. Taunting the gods above and gravity below with every ounce of your being.
To be entirely fair, there’s also a HUD, a considerable amount of motion blur and plenty of track to traverse as you jockey for position with fifteen other riders, but the main draw of Pure is the visceral thrill of performing death-defying feats of acrobatic skill — and thankfully, Black Rock Studios has made it incredibly easy to fulfill your daredevil dreams.
Basically a ingenious cross of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater and Burnout — and actually quite similarly to SSX — Pure combines the genres of extreme sports and over-the-top racing into one cohesive package by providing 36 racing tracks that feature drastic changes in elevation… and a set of midair tricks that can be performed over each and every jump to fill up your boost meter, which you can then use to gain a burst of speed. Thing is, your boost meter (or “Thrill Bar”) also doubles as your trick gauge — the higher it gets, the more daring, difficult and rewarding tricks you can perform. As we discussed in our companion preview, this simple consideration allows for considerable strategy when choosing how to tackle jumps.
But just because I used the word strategy doesn’t imply that busting out over-the-top stunts is in any way difficult. Though Pure is certainly based on a powerful physics engine (be sure to hold down R3 whenever your rider is hurled hilariously through the air), Black Rock has softened the effects of gravity to the point that you can get truly ludicrous air off a good percentage of the game’s jumps, and from there it’s a simple matter of pressing a face button and choosing a direction on the analog stick to pull off a trick. If you’ve got extra hang-time before you need to brace for the landing impact, you can chain tricks together — or “tweak” existing ones into a second related trick for extra boost and points.
Like with most racing games, Pure has no story to speak of, just a fairly linear progression from one series of racing events to the next in your quest to be the best ATV rider in the world… but here too the game shows simple, elegant design in the form of a carrot-and-stick incentive system. Rather than a rigid requirement to attain first place in every individual race to progress and unlock a variety of aftermarket parts and upgrades, the game’s World Tour mode awards points depending on your standing in each race and only requires a certain number of points to attract the eye of your next sponsor. I found myself restarting races far less often when I realized that I could make do with even a couple of fifth-place finishes as long as my other scores were superb. For overzealous players like myself this comes in quite handy, as the game doesn’t seem to have any rubberbanding to assist after you botch a landing or three.
Even the game’s personalization system is intuitive. All the new parts you get can be used to build ATVs from scratch in the game’s garage — from the frame on up, you get to choose every major component and its color — but you can also swap in and out individual parts at the flick of a stick, or have the system automatically complete an ATV you’ve already started building — tossing parts together almost like a pro dealer shuffles a stack of cards — just by holding down a button.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a game that better deserves the phrase “pick-up-and-play,” but the thing about Pure that entrances me is how deep the game can be when you really dive in. The beautiful thing about Pure is that it gives you what you think you wanted right at the beginning — serious air and the ability to pull off crazy tricks. But after a while, you learn that air isn’t everything. In later races and in online competition, in fact, air isn’t enough — because whenever your wheels aren’t touching the ground, they aren’t propelling you forward. You want to barely clip that palm tree as you fly over. You want to touch bottom at just the right angle and with just the right amount of spin in your wheels to let them carve, saw-like, through that dirt in a perfect drift upon landing. You want to ease back on the throttle before those tiny jumps so as just to hop over, pose for the camera, and keep your forward momentum driving you towards victory.
In short, to master Pure you have to step out of that comfort zone, that cushion of air Pure wonderfully provides for new players. But you don’t have to learn to do this on your own, because Black Rock has made this a breeze as well by providing Pure with Sprint and Freestyle game modes. The former is composed of short courses that make you rely entirely on your racing skills, and the latter filled with ramps and power-ups that force you to learn how to string together tricks and rack up points. After practicing with each separately for a while and then putting together both halves of the equation in Race mode, I was astounded by how much I’d improved.
Pure is family-friendly fun for all ages, teaches you to look like a champ ATV star and is a blast to play online. If you enjoy arcade racing titles at all, you have no excuse not to pick up a copy of Pure.
For extraordinary fun and value for money such that we just had to buy our own personal copy, we also award Pure our first-ever Official GameCyte Seal of Approval.
GameCyte Giveaway: We loved Pure, and now we want our review copy to go to a good home. How about yours?
Submit a comment below explaining why you feel you’re particularly deserving of the game, include a valid email address we can reach you at, and in a week’s time we’ll choose one lucky GameCyte reader to be the recipient of a Pure prize pack containing our slightly-used PlayStation 3 review copy, as well as a cap, T-shirt and chain wallet all prominently featuring the Pure logo.
November 11th, 2008 at 1:07 pm
I would surely like to win the copy of Pure. From what I have just read I think I would like the fact that Pure has the extra depth in available vehicle customizations though you could also just “pick up and play” for an arcade racer experience if you so choose. Sounds great and right up my alley.
November 14th, 2008 at 1:10 am
I’m out of a job, in debt, and last week had my license revoked due to an unpaid ticket I had no idea I even had. If driving in the virtual world of Pure doesn’t cheer me up and satiate my need to road rage on somebody, nothing will!
November 17th, 2008 at 3:21 pm
@Mwl:
Whether you like it or not, you have been selected as our winner in the Pure prize pack giveaway!
After reading that you were in dire financial straits and without a good way to cause vehicular mayhem, we decided that it would be cruel not to allow you to procrastinate your problems some more — and therefore, we have a slightly used review copy of Pure to which you are welcome to glue your eyeballs.
We’ll also throw in a Pure chain wallet (in which you can stash all the money you don’t have) and a T-shirt and cap that — in conjunction with the exhaust vents on your PS3 — will keep you warm when the snows come.