Pure Hands-on Preview

We saw a few impressive off-road racers at Games Convention 2008 and right at the top of the list is Disney’s Pure, the ATV racer coming to Xbox 360, PS3 and PC. With an emphasis on huge jumps, tricks and speed boosts Pure is carving out a different path to Sony’s brutal MotorStorm sequel. Wanting to get a little more time with the game we tore around a selection of tracks and game modes in a near-complete build of the PS3 version and ended up with a feeling that this could be the most exhilarating racer of the year.

Pure isn’t pretending to be something more than it is: an off-road racer with massive jumps. It has no delusions of grandeur on a scale of something like Codemasters’ DIRT, but developer Black Rock Studios has clearly tried to make the most insane off-road racer of all time. If you thought you’d seen big jumps in other off-road racers, you ain’t seen nothing yet. At times in Pure you’ll get so high that it wouldn’t surprise you to see a Boeing 747 soaring through the sky next to you. The fact that the tracks are based on real-life locales, not fantasy locations, makes this feel all the more impressive.

Key to these jumps and the game as a whole is the way you get big air. The pre-loading system seen in off-road racers going back as far as we can remember is core to this, with you pulling back on the right analogue stick and then pushing forward as you leap off a hill crest. Doing this successfully will propel you into the air, giving you time to perform tricks. To begin with you can only perform tricks by holding the X button (on PS3) and combining this with a direction on the left analogue stick – and a shoulder button for another set of moves. Pulling off a trick (it’s best to keep things fresh by not performing the same trick over and over again) will add some juice to your boost meter and open up new tricks on circle and triangle.

This is where some tactics come into play. You can simply perform some tricks with X and then use the boost by pressing square, giving you a temporary speed advantage over your rivals or perform more tricks, opening up better tricks on circle and triangle, and eventually special tricks by combining L1 and R1. You can of course get a little cocky, trying to pull off that one needed trick to get access to a special trick, only to time it so poorly that you end up flying face first into a rocky cliff face.

Tricks are hugely important during the Race game mode, but on the shorter Sprint tracks you don’t encounter anywhere near as many jump opportunities. As such these are much more your traditional skill-based race events. We can’t say we enjoyed these as much as the thrill-a-second Race events, but the variety is there if you want it. Finally there’s Freestyle, a game mode that does away with trying to finish first, instead focussing on high scores. You have a limited amount of fuel, but the tracks are littered with pick-ups (topping up fuel, increasing boost, multiplying score and allowing you to perform signature tricks) and you gain a fuel re-fill at the start of every new lap.

The three modes each provide a very different experience. The preview build doesn’t show how progression will work, but presumably you’ll start off in the lowly ranked D-class ATVs and work up from there. We did get to sample the ATV creation tool, putting together our custom-ride piece by piece. We’re not sure if this will offer anything over your typical tuning tools in racers, but it certainly looks impressive.

‘Looks impressive’ is something of a massive understatement when talking about the in-race visuals. We can’t think of another off-road racer that makes better use of current-gen hardware – including MotorStorm: Pacific Rift. Even this work-in-progress build ran at a smooth frame rate and featured a hugely impressive draw distance. The size of the levels is simply immense and they’re not bare bones either, packed full with track side detail. Thanks to the various routes you can take it feels as though you’re almost free to go anywhere. Pure has a pretty incredible sense of speed too, even when racing on the slower D-class ATVs.

We were hugely impressive by Pure. It’s a game we’ve had our eye on since it was announced with a rather impressive in-game trailer and thankfully the gameplay seems to be matching the stunning visuals. MotorStorm: Pacific Rift might end up offering a more brutal off-road racing experience, but for fun alone Pure might just have the edge. Look for our full review later this month.

Pure is scheduled for release for Xbox 360, PS3 and PC on September 26.