Despite a few shortcomings in the game, Arctic Edge is an admirable attempt by the developers to bring a PS3 franchise on the PSP. If you consider that this game does not present anything exceptional, it does kind of make up for it by sheer volume of content. A few hitches apart, Arctic Edge is still a fairly robust racing game, that should be an enjoyable experience for any racing fan�just do not expect a lot from it.
.jpg)
After bringing much mayhem and chaos on the PlayStation 3, Motorstorm now makes its presence felt on the PlayStation Portable. Even though MotorStorm Arctic Edge retains the essence that made Motostorm popular on the PlayStation 3; it is certainly affected by reduced availability of processing power. The grandeur and scale of the game’s visuals— something that is MotorStorm’s hallmark on the PS3— is sorely missed on the small PSP screen with reduced details. However, if the game’s visuals are not something that primarily draws you towards the series, then you should enjoy playing Arctic Edge.
This time MotorStorm is served by a different group of developers— the bigBig Games, of Pursuit Force fame. In spite of this, thankfully the attitude of MotorStorm remains intact, with crazy multi-tier tracks, reckless jumps and multiple routes.
Let the festivities begin
.jpg)
The single player mode in Arctic Edge is called “Festival” and it is a series of racing challenges, visually represented in the form of a spiral ladder. Along with standard races, I discovered two other modes– namely Time Ticker and Speed. The Time Ticker races starts with a timer that counts up from 0 to 999 and the first racer to reach that mark wins the race. The speed with which the counter moves towards the magic number depends on your position in the race. This slightly alternative take on regular races makes for interesting play. Speed mode on the other hand in rather more conventional— it is a timed event with multiple checkpoints. Crossing a checkpoint adds five seconds to the clock, and you are ranked according to time remaining after you cross the final checkpoint.
.jpg)
Wining events in Festival mode brings plenty of rewards— the most essential of the lot are racer points and special achievement stars. Points will accumulate to increase you racer rank which starts from one all the way to rank eight. Racer rank, along with the stars is needed to unlock events in the single player mode. Other notable reward is that new rides get progressively unlocked from a pool of 24. Winning single player events also unlocks customization options like liveries, paint jobs, sponsor sticker, external body parts, etc. All of these bring only aesthetic changes to the vehicles and does not affect its actual performance. Trophies from the PS3 version take the form of ‘Badges’ on the PSP—these are awarded on achieving a certain milestone in your racing (or wrecking) career. Finally, the booty of un-lockable content includes racer models and bonus media. So as you can imagine, between the numerous single player events and the bonus content; there is enough to keep an average player busy for 15- 20 hours.
Not cool as ice
.jpg)
Racing against computer controlled AI was a mixed experience mainly due to apparent balance issues. Races are a challenge as long as you are not in the pole position—once you manage to lead the race for a few seconds; all other racers seem to inexplicably lag behind by a fairly large margin. At least with the races that I played, I noticed that the game’s AI becomes a lot more forgiving once you start leading the pack. Additionally, there are frequent instances where other racers commit suicide by overdosing on Boost. This behaviour by the AI does not appear to be an attempt to take out other racers along with it—a morbid tactic often used in MotorStorm.
.jpg)
Apart from sketchy AI, another thing that works against Arctic Edge is the game’s visuals. Eye-candy apart, the race tracks often appear a bit too busy and this impedes visual clarity. This is all the more evident when jumping over ramps and negotiating through narrow tracks, over gaping chasms. I am not too sure if this is a conscious and deliberate design decision by the developers, to add to the challenge.
Taking it online
.jpg)
Arctic Edge on PSP also supports multiplayer using both Ad-Hoc and Infrastructure modes. I did not have the opportunity to try the Ad- Hoc mode; however I did play a few races on PSN. Finding an existing game was not easy, so I resigned myself to hosting games. Evidently there were not too many players online when I was playing; as each time the server could find only one other player. This seemed to have worked to my advantage as the races were pretty much lagging free.
Despite a few shortcomings in the game, Arctic Edge is an admirable attempt by the developers to bring a PS3 franchise on the PSP. If you consider that this game does not present anything exceptional, it does kind of make up for it by sheer volume of content. A few hitches apart, Arctic Edge is still a fairly robust racing game, that should be an enjoyable experience for any racing fan—just do not expect a lot from it.
Rating: 7.0/10
Details
Genre: Racing
Platform: PlayStation Portable
Developer: bigBig Games
Publisher: SCE
Distributor: Milestone Interactive
Price: INR 1,499