The game play is fairly good, for example ruts in the mud is probably a bit inconsequential as you drove through boneyards at 90mph. Playing an 80 per cent-complete version of Pacific Rift, you suspect the devs felt the same. With the reduced focus on terrain deformation, the grip thing now has a new and more important playmate: potent secondary routes. More than just a winning high road and losing mud-slick below, the alternatives here benefit from increased boost-cooldown from water pools and other options to test and then reward accomplished players. It's no longer about whether you're good enough to hold the high road; it's whether you're good enough to make the most of the road you're on.
You still use boost constantly, waiting impatiently for it to cool off or timing peak usage to coincide with huge jumps, so that you can let go as you soar through the air, or to end just before a section you can't help but slow for, but the introduction of water pools to cool your vehicle is impactful and when done right, it's an object lesson in track design. Tracks also do well juggling MotorStorm's many vehicle types, with thoughtful ramps and jumps, each of which has differing implications for the cast of bikes, trucks, buggies, ATVs, and now of course monster trucks.
The Cascade Falls improves on every lap. Its deep-water ponds with marked out shallows, barricaded shortcuts with mouse-hole entry points and layers of foliage present new challenges, backed up by more traditional obstacles: narrow high and low bridges and ramps to potentially switch low to high, tightening corners on mushy surfaces to punish overzealous boosters, and a final wide, banking half-pipe corner to reward those who've kept a bit in the tank. There are also hot-air balloons in the background, of which we approve, obviously.
Cascade Falls is one of the Water tracks, but there are also Air and Earth alternatives and of course Fire, which we hadn't seen before. When we do, the Wildfire circuit immediately threatens to disrupt the game balance with semi-molten magma piles strewn across its smoky, volcanic terrain, which prove fatal on contact, but in practice they're only damaging when you short a jump and end up going for a boiling swim, sinking (rather unconvincingly) into the surface texture and, more importantly, having to reset to track and losing vital seconds.
Probably the biggest surprise in the latest build though is, well, how drab it looks. There are times when there's cohesion between the beautiful, mountainous horizons and less exotic foreground visuals, but it still looks better in replays than it does on the go, as miles of monotonous volcanic rock and dust and mud rush beneath your tyres anonymously and the magma piles at the track edge look like lumps of mouldy jelly, although the embers on the breeze and juxtaposition of heat haze and water mist compensates to some extent. Rain God Spires and sections of Cascade Falls are much prettier, but The Island still has some way to go before it matches the best Monument Valley offered two years ago.
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