Pure [Slim]

Bought Pure for a tenner from play.com, which is nuts cheap! Fired it up for a quick burn and was still there four hours later. Bastard son of Burnout and SSX riding a quad bike, this has superb visuals and a great trick system. The pressures on to keep your boost high so you can perform advance tricks, or using it to keep ahead of the race. There's a lot to think about, with four trick buttons and then multiple varients of each trick, but it's all pretty intuitive. You've also got a lot of choices to make while hurling yourself through the air, have you got time to chain another combo in, which trick to do next (you get bonuses for not repeating), where you going to land...

There's a couple of different race types too; sprint is just a short blast around a track with a few jumps, almost like a motocross event, race is an event on longer tracks with a good number of jumps and tricking opportunities, freestyle is just tricking with powerups and modifiers dotted around the track and a multiplier for trick points that requires you to trick every few seconds or lose out big time on the final score. Freestyle also adds a fuel tank, collecting power ups gives you more gas and gives you more time to trick but there's more risk-reward decisions to be made, as boosting uses more fuel, but allows you to pull off bigger tricks.

The tracks look amazing, with real belly churning jumps that remind me of the first time playing wipeout on the psx, multiple routes and shortcuts that require split second choices between the shorter distance or the higher jumps for tricks.

Downers? Only that the game has you building your own Quad, which is cool, but very long winded. You've lots of parts, each with a stat balance between handling, tricking, top speed, and more and it can take a while to pick what you need. In the end you can tell the game to just build you one with the best bits, which I think is what most people will end up doing. Realistically you need to bikes, one that's fast and one that's best for tricks for the freestyle events.

Brilliant fun, full on next-gen 'wooooo shiiiiiit' style fun off cliffs and an amazing bargain for a tenner. I know a couple of the chaps bought it too, so hopefully multi will be a laugh as well.