PURE might sound like the name of a brand of bottled water, but it's actually the name of a sweet new ATV racing game coming soon from Disney Interactive Studios.
"We wanted to pick a name that didn't specifically broadcast that this is an ATV game," said Tim Fitzrandolph of Blackrock Studio, the game's developer. "Mostly because the way ATV games have been presented up until now is quite different than this game. Since the real focus of this game is on the tricks and the feel you get when you go over these ridiculous jumps, we wanted to pick something that evoked that kind of emotion."
PURE is different enough that Fitzrandolph feels calling it an "ATV racing game" doesn't quite cover it.
"It's an offroad trick racing game," he said. "We're calling it that as a our genre. Tricks are a really important part of the game."
Here's the scoop: gamers pick drivers and ATVs, then take to rough, outdoor tracks. While they race, they can also do tricks. In a lot of games this isn't a great idea because tricking just slows you down or makes you blow the entire race when you trick right into a tree. However, Blackrock has found a way to make it essential. Pulling off a trick fills your boost meter. The more tricks you do, the more boost you get. Boosting allows you make up a lot of ground very fast, but it has other uses as well.
"The basic mechanic of the game when you're racing is to do tricks to get boost, use boost to go faster to win the race," said Fitzrandolph. "There's a trade-off: the more boost you accumulate, the more access to tricks you have."
PURE's environments are gorgeous.
Fitzrandolph loaded up a track from Wyoming to demonstrate. The tracks, by the way, are gorgeous, thick with vegetation, muddy ground that kicks up dust and mud. All under a roof of clear blue skies. When you pull off a particularly nice trick, the camera will subtly shift to give you a view of the vista. I found that it shows off the graphics nicely without disorienting the player. "You can see miles and miles from these big jumps," commented Fitzrandolph as he grabbed some big air, revealing the valley beneath us.
"I can see my house from up here!"
On the track, Fitzrandolph zoomed around and soon began stunting off every hill. We saw the rider hanging only by handlebars, sitting over the handlebars, even playing air guitar. Before long, he had the maximum level of tricking: a special.
"I've landed several successful tricks and I've filled my boost meter all the way, which gave me [a] special trick," narrated Fitzrandolph as his ATV ripped up the track. A star appeared on the HUD to indicate that a special trick was ready. When he found a big enough jump, he launched the special, and his rider did an insane stunt, letting go of the bike and spinning through the air before landing.
"The cool thing about a special trick is that once you have [it] banked there, you can boost all you want and you'll still have it available," explained Fitzrandolph. "You can boost your way around the track. Once you find a large enough jump, do your special trick, and if you land it successfully you'll get back a lot of that boost that you've used up." Fitzrandolph said that players who can get into this groove win races.
"One of the main strategies for the game is to wait, wait, wait, build-up, build-up, build-up, do a bunch of tricks until you have your special trick. Then boost like crazy until you find a big jump, land the special trick, get back the boost, boost again and try to link the special tricks together," he informed us. "Which of course is quite difficult, because you can't crash anywhere at that point or you'll lose the boost you've spent all that time accumulating."
Controlling the ATV is nice and simple. Anyone comfortable with an arcade racer should have it down. There are even on-screen prompts for tricks. "Special tricks, you just hold down the shoulders and select a direction," said Fitzrandolph. "There's eight different special tricks that each rider has for the eight major directions of movement."
Holding tricks, doing multiple tricks in a jump equals more boost. "Tricks can also be tweaked," revealed Fitzrandolph. "For example, if I hold down the right shoulder I can tweak it for an augmented version of that trick. You can do that for every regular trick in the game."
Despite the simplicity of the controls, Fitzrandolph says you there is a lot of depth to them, provided you read the terrain right.
"You have to think not only about your race, but also your trajectory," he explained. "You can control how far you're going to jump. If you just go off a jump regularly, you'll get a certain amount of air." Wily racers can "pre-load" a jump. That's when ATV drivers push down on the shocks to give themselves more lift into a jump.
"You hold down the left stick as you approach the jump," demonstrated Fitzrandolph. "As you go off the crest, you flick the stick up. Depending on how do that, you'll get a bigger jump. If you boost up to a jump you're going to get even more air. So there are a lot of situations where if I hit [a jump] just right, I can just barely make it to that extra path."
Speaking of extra paths, each level has shortcuts and multiple routes, some of which are only accessible after a big jump. "That's one of the key elements to our tracks," said Fitzrandolph. "It's not just shortcuts. There are a multiple routes, and all tracks have a lot of different paths you could take. All the paths have different reasons you would choose them. Some of them are true shortcuts. Maybe one's more of a straightaway, so if you want to boost, you can take that path, just blaze through. Or if you need to get more air, you might take a path that has opportunities to jump. There's a lot of different variety and replayability even to just a single track."
The game will have seven different locations, all based on real world locales. Each location will have one or more tracks. "Usually more," according to Fitzrandolph. Some of the locations he revealed to us are New Mexico, Wyoming and Italy. Each track will have 16 racers on it at a time, both offline and online. The tracks are partly destructible, so a wild turn might send tires or haystacks across the screen. The game treats these as real objects, so if someone wipes out into the barrier, they might fire debris on to the track, which will wipeout someone else.
"We have different surfaces as well," revealed Fitzrandolph. "You can see the difference between a dry section and a muddy section of the track. The look and feel and the handling of the bike changes depending on the conditions."
PURE is also a great game for gearheads, allowing them to customize their bikes right down to the bare bones. "We have a lot of customization for your bikes," said Fitzrandolph. "We really focused on allowing a deep level of customization. When you start, you start literally from thin air. From the frame. Pick the frame you want to use, the colour you want, and then go through every single component that makes up an ATV."
Racers who really want the bike built to their own specifications can choose different frames, shocks, engine classes and so on. "You can literally choose every single piece and make exactly your ATV," said Fitzrandolph. All of these pieces change the performance. For example, some shocks will allow you to gain more air when jumping, but the more bouncy they are, the tougher the bike is to handle. More pieces will be unlocked in the game's World Tour Mode.
"You can also upgrade, which really changes the handling of the bike," said Fitzrandolph. You can also customize your rider. "The components and some of the clothing and stuff is licensed."
At every step of the customization, you can colour the piece of your ATV, so you can get some pretty wild colour schemes going. When you get down to this level of detail, it looks like the ATV exploded and then froze in mid-air.
"It turns out [ATV's are] not made of too many parts, so we could actually go to this level of detail," said Fitzrandolph. If this sounds intimidating, don't worry. There are preset machines, and even a quick builder.
"I can hold down either Y or X depending on what kind of bike I want--race style or free style bike--so if I just hold down X, it's going to pick parts and build a bike for me in a few seconds that's tuned for racing," said Fitzrandolph. "And of course I can go back and make changes to any of the components." As you play through the game, you can unlock additional slots to store bikes. At the time of our interview, the maximum number of slots wasn't official, though our build had 10.
"You might want to make a specific bike for a specific track," said Fitzrandolph. "We know we have more depth here than most offroad games give you. Hopefully when you go online you'll really have a unique bike. You won't see the same bike twice."
Sounds great so far, though there is one disappointing bit of news regarding PURE. Seems as though there are no plans to offer downloadable content after release.
"With the time that we have, we decided to really focus on the polish, which hopefully is coming across," said Fitzrandolph. "We've decided to focus on the core experience of the game. Rather than do downloadble content poorly, we'd rather not do it." On the plus side, the game has a nice soundtrack. There's "Woman" by Wolfmother and the very appropriate "Grease Monkey" by Jeff Beck.
Once upon a time, Blackrock was known as Climax Racing, and developed Moto GP games and ATV Offroad Fury. It's evident that this expertise has gone into PURE. Fitzrandolph says he hopes PURE will pull in new audiences.
"We wanted to make sure we got people who are action-sports fans," said Fitzrandolph. Fans of arcade-style racing games as well."
PURE looks to be a fun racer with surprising depth and gorgeous terrain. Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC owners will be able to take it for a spin on September 23.
-Jason MacIsac
Jason MacIsaac is the Executive Editor of Elecplay.com. He's anything but pure.