MotorStorm: Apocalypse

Playing as the Rookie, a stowaway MotorStorm fanboy, will be more "flattering" to the player than previous games in the series have been, he says, while the Veteran will offer the series' most technical races to date against a small clique of elite competitors. But the lawless racers aren't the only presence in the city as it falls apart.

There are two other factions present: a private military corp hired to defend the wealthiest parts of the city but now mad with power, and an anarchistic enclave of "crazies" clinging on to life in a disaster zone, equally antipathetic to the soldiers and racers. The military will shoot at you as you race, while crazies scatter across the track for you to mow down like ragdolls, lob molotovs and hijack vehicles.

To begin with this is all just part of the spectacle as they focus on the AI drivers, but soon they'll be impeding your own progress. "They also focus on each other and they create dynamic route changes, damage and destruction," says Southern. "If you had an earthquake on every single track it would be pretty cool, but it would get kind of tired. They're going to have a major role to play in terms of this idea that every single race is different."

The earthquakes will have a bigger role still, though, as they carve a world of urban order up into something more suitable for the wild off-road exuberance of MotorStorm. You'll race across rooftops, leaping from skyscraper to skyscraper, career down the side of collapsed buildings, blast through offices and homes, dive into the subways and sewers and across parks and the beach. There'll be night races too.

Still, the introduction of concrete and tarmac into MotorStorm's broad vocabulary of racing surfaces does invite new vehicle classes, and we get four: supercars, sports compacts, muscle cars and superbikes. "It's the fastest MotorStorm we've ever made, that's for sure, but they don't offer a particular advantage over the other classes as long as you race in the right way," says Southern.

Alongside the existing buggies, big rigs, mud pluggers and so on, that's now a bewildering range of hardware for Evolution to balance. The urban milieu and dynamic events also present a major challenge for another series trademark - wide, sprawling, open course design with multiple routes suited to different vehicles.

This is the most notable casualty in the short demo race we get a chance to play. At the wheel of a muscle car, I dodge crazies lunging across the track in a fuel truck, race under tower blocks as they list together, and am plunged into the subway when the road simply crumbles away under me. Triangle button prompts zoom the camera in on slow-mo stunts and catastrophes mid-race. It's thunderously effective, very direct, requires quick reactions to avoid wrecking out but hardly any technical cornering at all.

It's also very, very scripted. Every playthrough, the same events happen at the same moments, the track falling apart or coming together right under my wheels while my opponents herd around; it's not really possible to get ahead of or behind the mayhem, and there are very few route diversions, none of them meaningful. Southern stresses that, while it's representative of everything new in Apocalypse, it's not representative of the whole game.