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MotorStorm Goes Apocalyptic
With LittleBigPlanet 2 already announced a month ago and Infamous 2 recently revealed via our July cover, we were beginning to wonder if Sony had any other exciting sequels to show off at E3. Turns out they have at least one more...and it just got announced ahead of time as well.
The PlayStation Blog has revealed MotorStorm Apocalypse, the fourth game in the first-party racing series that started early this generation. All of the MotorStorm games have focused on various methods of destroying your off-road vehicles, but Apocalypse takes the tracks out of natural environments and into cities that are being wrecked.
MotorStorm's locale this time around is called simply 'The City,' and it's based off the Bay Area in northern California -- San Francisco, San Jose, and other West Coast cities. Like the recently-released Split/Second, tracks will change as you progress. If a building falls down during one race, it will stay down during subsequent races on the same track, creating a sense of chronology that you don't normally see in racing games.
In his post on the PlayStation blog, game director Matt Southern stresses that the setting is not post-apocalyptic, because it's taking place during the apocalypse. Expect to speed across the roofs of collapsing buildings, take shortcuts through abandoned offices, and discover many other absurd techniques to survive this world in the midst of its devastation.
Apocalypse will also have an online "Wreckreation" mode with up to 16 players (or four-player split-screen). Online players will be able to customize their vehicles heavily, both visually and in terms of performance. Rankings and unlockable rewards will attempt to keep gamers hooked on multiplayer long after Apocalypse's release, as will a "Game Mode Creator" that allows players to design their own game rules and even use them in online tournaments.
As someone who enjoyed the first two MotorStorm releases quite a bit, I've got to say that I'm pretty psyched for this installment. The move to urban environments that are crumbling around you sounds like the perfect shake-up to help create another stand-out racing game. We'll be checking it out next week at E3 to let you know for how it's coming along.
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