Reviews
On the ground, Pure plays like MX vs. ATV, and in the air it plays like SSX. You complete tricks and stunts for to increase your thrill bar which is effectively boost. There is more reward for complexity and originality, so you get progressively less boost for executing the same trick over and over again. To get air to perform tricks you pull down on the right thumb stick and push up quickly as approach the crest of a jump, and while in the air you press the ‘A’ button and use the left thumb stick to perform tricks. At about 50% of your thrill bar, ‘B’ button tricks become available. Then when you are at about 80% of thrill bar, the ‘Y’ button becomes available. ‘A’ button tricks are quick to execute and good for smaller jumps. ‘Y’ button tricks take the most amount of time but reap the most reward. Pressing a bumper button while executing a trick will perform a variation of that trick and will get you more boost as a result. Max out your thrill bar and you get the chance to perform your star trick. This is executed by holding both bumper buttons and takes longer to execute than any other trick. Nail it properly and you retain a full thrill bar and retain the star trick so in essence you can get to execute it as often as you want provide you land it and don’t crash.
Crashing is something that you will unfortunately do your fair share of in Pure. Mistimed tricks, hitting objects and performing a trick after failing to execute a jump properly will all result in you crashing out which costs you thrill boost as well as time, and your special trick if you have one of those. It’s not the end of the world if you crash as you are reset at a rolling start reasonably quickly. However, occasionally you will hit an object placed on the edge of the course, and rather than reset you must reverse out of whatever jam you are in and accelerate from a stationary position. This causes you to lose an awful lot of time and it only needs to happen once for the race to be out of your grasp. This inconsistency in the vehicle reset is easily the biggest frustration in the game but it becomes less of an issue with practice.
The learning curve in Pure is quite steep, and it gets steeper the more you progress. The AI racers don’t seem to make many mistakes, and don’t seem to suffer the adverse affects from tussling for the racing line. Even if you have a flawless race, you will find it hard to finish first. You start every race with 15 other racers, and it gets busy as you will fight for the racing line (especially in freestyle events where you all head for the same power-ups). You also hear one liners from your character as well as the AI racers. The comments do become a tad repetitive but are not an annoyance as there is too much going on for you to pay attention to any such distractions.
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