Usually it’s over to Matt as soon as it comes to any sort of driving game. Any kind of sports in general and he dives right in. At the point when I got handed the copy of MotorStorm to look at I thought “Ooh this might actually have something interesting going on with it”. This mainly comes about because whereas Matt is more your Grand Turismo player to the extreme, I like something different about a driving game to interest me, be that driving on the ceiling or firing off a barrage of rockets at the opponent in front.

Saying all of this, I hoped that driving at high speeds along mountaintops might be the off-road Burnout equivalent. So, of course, with a new PS3 release at my fingertips armed with the knowledge that I might be playing the next big polished driving game that’ll appeal to those with a high adrenaline requirement and a requisite to exact pain on your rivals, I got my hopes up.

Ah. You see, where a game like Burnout has succeeded time and time again, even with the later watered-down versions we’ve been graced with, they’re still bloody good fun. So where does Motorstorm fall short?

Motorstorm’s all about off-road, dangerous tracks that you race around in a variety of vehicles from monster trucks to motorbikes, and what’s more is that they’re mixed races. Instead of ‘all bikes’ or ‘all rally cars’, mixed races means that if you get near to a truck on a bike, you’re going to get minced. It’s not rocket science. You’ll compete on a variety of tracks which all have a few different routes you can take to not only help you get one up on your opponents, but some routes can be better for the vehicle you’re using. You can also compete online, but a lack of multiplayer splitscreen action might leave you feeling a little despondent.

“Hey this all sounds great, why the long face Jay?” I hear you say. Well, a note on the gameplay. As I was driving down the track, all grins and everything, I hit what can only be described as a dimple in the road. I was at this point catapulted at a horizontal angle off a cliff. Now I don’t know about you, but at the worse case scenario I would’ve expected to maybe do a Bond style flip of my car in a general forward fashion, not to be flung sideways. What’s worse is that on the second lap I hit the bloody thing again and stopped dead. At this point everyone – yes, everyone - passed me by. Another strong point about the game is just how long it takes you to get in the top 3 and how quickly you can lose that spot in one crash. I’m sure you can imagine the side effects of driving a truck and trying to kick start that while a bike zooms on past.

The Burnout element is that you can boost. This charges up at the start, and then you can use it throughout the race so long as you keep an eye on the heat levels. If you use it too much, it’ll blow your car up, but not to worry as it’ll cool down over time for you to use again. What you can worry about however is that using boost merely brings you up speed. It’s not exactly “Woah” factor to use all your boost and bring your car up to what feels like around a solid 60mph. Again this might be the Burnout factor, but then this game is blatantly trying to jump on that bandwagon so I can make the connection.

It’s not their fault after all, trying to rush a title out for the PS3 launch. But, you know, I’m not alone in getting my hopes up with what to expect. Quite frankly I can walk out and pay £150 less and get the same result as what I’m seeing from the PS3 at the moment. Motorstorm isn’t helping with little things like driving through the patches of grass, rather than perhaps bending under the car they pass straight through. I give the bloom effects my thumbs up, mind.

Anyway, I digress. Motorstorm was what looked to be a great title for the release date, and while it looks quite probable that this will be one of the better launch titles, it’s not met my expectations. If you have a PS3 and need a game then I can recommend it, but for anyone looking for a reason to buy a new console it’s hard to recommend MotorStorm as justification.