Pure [PS3]

To give you extra air, you can pre-load your ATV by pulling back on the left analog stick to prepare the machine for the jump. You can modify this as much as you want, from ten percent to ninety percent of maximum load on your shocks to gain additional distance. As you land, you can also adjust the position of where you land on your quad, including the front or rear wheels to maintain your momentum. This can be particularly important when you consider that there are multiple pathways that a racer can take around a stage, giving you possible shortcuts that can shave additional seconds off your time. However, these frequently come with a large number of obstacles such as switchbacks, chasms or other problems that you'll need to navigate across.

Of course, while having experience with these stages is important, having an ATV that can deliver the performance you need is extremely crucial as well. Fortunately, if you don't like one of the vehicles that you can acquire in the game, you can make your own from the frame up. Players can modify the speed, acceleration, handling, boost and trick stats of each machine with licensed components, including engines, shocks and wheels, as well as tweaking the look of the machine. Apparently, there's enough variety within the game to make more than 60,000 different ATVs, so there should be plenty for racers to choose from.

While the speed of the game was impressive, the visuals of the build we saw were truly incredible. The draw distance of the game portrayed the incredible height and scope of the level you were on, so you could see for miles around as you launched off a hillside and saw the details of the landscape below. Black Rock has stocked a large number of visual enhancements in the title, including a visual rendering system that provides a large volume of grass, foliage, rocks and other environmental objects in the immediate foreground. Using a process taken direct from the movie Monsters, Inc., Black Rock has been able to continuously create up to 200,000 instances of these items as racers ride through a track. As a result, the lines that racers take will always change as tire tracks deepen and spin out varying levels of gravel and twigs.

Black Rock has also spent a lot of time on their game engine, which was uniquely built for Pure, to add in a brand new physics and advanced ragdoll system. As a result, every crash landing that you see will look different than the next one, and you'll see plenty of crashes in the game. To highlight the different angles and painful bruises that your riders will acquire over the course of a race, the developers included a free-floating camera, which can actually get banged into by ATVs or the bodies of riders as racers wipeout. Additionally supporting the gameplay will be a large soundtrack of thirty to forty songs covering rock, drum and bass and hip hop. Want to experience Pure? Check out the videos below.

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