Pure is being developed by Black Rock Studios, the new name for the now wholly-owned Climax Racing. Prior to being acquired by Disney, Climax was a well-regarded racing developer noted for the last two ATV Offroad Fury games. According to game director Jason Avent, who was running the Pure demonstration station, Black Rock marks Disney's first attempt to re-enter the hardcore games space. While the company has done fairly well among the young set with a succession of licensed products based on some of the most powerful brands in the world, it continually finds itself being shut out of older demographics by established videogame companies built around catering to the hardcore. "It's been great for Black Rock," Avent said of the studio's mouse-eared overlord. "Their only requirement is that we make the kinds of games we love making and make them great."
That brought us to Pure, an exaggerated version of ATV quad bike racing that fuses together both the thrill of tearing a highly unstable four-wheeled moped around with the kind of sick air trick strings seen in games like EA's venerable SSX series. The controls are fairly simple. The left analog stick is used to steer, do "pre-loads" for jumps and select tricks in the air. The left and right triggers control acceleration and braking and the bumper buttons modify and string together tricks. The simplicity and arcade feel make Pure easy to pick up and play and the hyper-realistic tracks that can vault a player some 200 feet in the air make the game enjoyable from the first few moments.
That's not to say that there isn't some skill involved in playing Pure. It didn't take too many 8th place finishes before we began to get the hankering to get closer to pole position. This is accomplished via a boost system that's intimately tied in with the trick system. A player's speed boost power is measured on a meter that fills up based on the length and difficulty of the trick they do while in the air. As the meter fills up, the player will gain access to more and more complicated tricks (triggered by first the "X," then the Circle and Triangle buttons on the PS3). Using boost up, on the other hand, will deprive the player of access to those tricks most needed to keep the meter filled. There's considerable strategy then, in learning where and how to jump and how to string together tricks to keep the boost meter filled even while tearing around at maximum speed to win the race. In our case, our proudest moment came when we cleared a tricky double hill and played air guitar on a 200-foot drop only to have the entire boost meter fill up again as soon as we hit the ground.
While we didn't have more than a few brief minutes to glance through the new "create-a-ride" feature, it seems like this should be quite a boon for skilled players. According to Avent, hardcore gearheads who obsess over torque and RPM should find plenty of depth in the game's ability to mix-and-match parts with real-world brands. Each one has a different effect on the bike's speed, acceleration, handling, boost or tricks, and players will be able to get themselves a custom ride that maximizes their particular play style. Casual and new players, on the other hand, might also want to get their feet wet with the customization system, as a quad-wheel ATV isn't all that complicated as racing vehicles go. The effects of different loadouts should be pretty obvious and Black Rock hopes that this might pull new players into the custom tweaking community.
Pure is scheduled for release this September.
