The “Break it Down” Blog

Summary [8.0 out of 10]

Pure is a polished, accessible, technically savvy, beautiful offroad racing game that fans of the genre should pickup without hesitation and folks that enjoy racing should absolutely check out.

The Great

• The graphics are excellent. Very polished and complete, clearly coming out of a high-end study as there were not any instances that I noticed a blurry texture or shoddy animation that made me think the game was anything but an A-title.
• The framerate during play, even during the high jumps with huge vistas or crowded group race moments was very solid. There was no jerkiness or tearing frames – everything was smooth.



• Insanely high jumps are just awesome and give a really exhilarating thrill during the rate
  



• Can be played in an super-accessible/arcade-y way if desired, or you can dig down into the deep technical build-out of every single part on your ATV including things like struts, shocks, fly wheels, exhaust, decals, kick plates, etc.

The Good

• Environmental effects like getting mud on your ATV while racing, carving tire tracks in mud or getting your shirt dirty are all really nice touches.



• Races don’t seem to succumb to “rubber-banding” behavior by the AI if you start to loose (that is the effect where AI will slow down a lot if you start to loose by too much or speed up a lot if you start to kick their ass). The races pacing felt natural resulting in a few races where we blew away the other racers and in other races where we couldn’t get out of last place without an ATV upgrade.
• New parts or pieces unlock frequently when racing through single player so you almost always have something to look at in the garage and outfit on your bike if you are interested.
• Multiplayer was easy to hop into and as fun to play as you would expect. No hickups or jerkiness to report.

The Bad

• Pre-loading a jump is a cool idea on paper I think, in practice it messes with your ability to pull of the tricks well a bit (your fingers get confused).
• As well-designed and straight forward as the trick system is (3 face buttons and a direction on the analog stick OR L1/R1 plus direction for super-duper trick), I found the combination of pre-loading a jump (down then UP right as you crest a jump) to be too much work to then immediately follow up that movement with some completely different movement like Triangle+LEFT or something like that so I ended up pulling the same trick off over and over and over because it’s all my fingers could manage. The one change I might make here is turning off pre-loading on the easiest game-setting and just giving you the maximum “hop” off of hills that a pre-load would normally give you and allowing you to focus on the trick.

Conclusion [8.0 out of 10]

I’m a closet-racer fan… I like accessible racing games. Things like Gran Turismo can be a lot of fun with the right equipment, but I don’t normally go out and buy games like that. Additionally, games like Grid or Dirt can be just enough technical that they aren’t fun for me either – requiring you to run and re-run tracks over and over and over until you are in the top 3.

On the flip side, games that are such a arcadey joke that they aren’t even really racers aren’t fun either, so finding a game that strikes that perfect balance between arcade fun and technical realism is really hard; fortunately Pure is exactly that.

I would strongly recommend this game to anyone that is an offroading fan, even just a racing fan. I would tell closet-racer-fans (like myself) to absolutely rent this and even just try and blind-buy it used. For folks that don’t like racers at all, there isn’t anything hugely different here that will convert you, but it’s still a lot of fun.

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