Watch your step, for you’ve just entered the Graveyard. Inside, we’ll be digging up games that have long been without a pulse. You’ll see both good and bad souls unearthed every month as we search through the more… forgotten…parts of history.

The original Motorstorm was something of a paradigm shift for offroad racing and featured the most diverse lineup of vehicles on the market, but needed polish. It was an early PS3 hit and allowed the franchise to become a showcase for the hardware, but one could tell it was great only by launch window standards. It was also hurt by Sony's own presentations showing CG and not in-engine gameplay, which hurt the franchise's credibility with the public. Pacific Rift aimed to remedy this and brought about a photo mode while also bringing custom soundtracks into the fray ala the original Xbox thanks to music support on the hard drive.

Arctic Edge saw Sony use Bigbig Studios to bring it to lower-end hardware and the arctic theme showed off something that felt like an EA Big title from the PS2 era, but with a Motorstorm theme. It was quite impressive for the hardware, but always felt secondary due to it not appearing on the PS3 where the concept's visual style could truly come to life in new ways. The franchise raised the bar for track deformation in real-time and Apocalypse aimed to take that to the next level and go beyond what had been seen before -- not just for the series, but as a whole.

Split/Second hit the market the year before and featured track alterations with button-led events, but nothing matched the track shifting and changing like Apocalypse for better or worse. Being able to choose from more vehicle types kept things interesting as a player and having the freedom to choose any kind of vehicle in a free race let players learn each kind of vehicle as they wanted to, or they could hop into the career mode and enjoy a varied selection while going for a greater goal. The final entry in the series saw things like entire parts of the track disappear and then get repurposed into things like shortcuts for a later lap.

The player does have to be careful, however, because the fractures in the terrain can open up small gaps that take the player down for a while. The biggest flaw in the execution is that there's no rewind function and players are just stuck hitting select, then X to put themselves back on a track after hitting a gap that is right next to two pieces of drivable terrain, and then being out of commission for ten seconds or more. In lap one of a race, this can be overcome with relative ease, but the problem becomes much greater when it creeps up in the final lap or even worse, during the final couple of turns for an event. Losing a grand prix-style event at the last second because the game has wonky collision detection for road hazards is a pain and something that should have been ironed out.

Fortunately, it's the lone major problem with the core game, which has seen a lot of refinement and expansion from the original concept. What started off as the ultimate off-road racing game turned into something that wouldn't just work as a gateway game for that sub-genre, but could also stand on its own as an arcade-style racer thanks to all the cars available alongside more normal asphalt tracks. The diversity in the racing areas helps this feel like the ultimate racing game in some ways and evokes a bit of The Crew 2 in that regard, but far more focused in its concept and more polished with its execution. Instead of replicating a ton of different motorsports, the series aims to keep things rooted in fast-paced racing with multiple vehicle types.

The variety of vehicles helps ensure that the player never gets bored, but also serves a purpose for strategy. Some tracks works better for faster vehicles, while other that have a lot of turns in them are best-suited for a car that can both absorb damage but also easily take a corner. The tracks themselves offer up so much variety that each one is a challenge to learn and is largely fun to wage war in despite the technical hiccups provided by gaps made in the driving area. If that had been smoothed out before release, it would have taken an already-fantastic experience and made it better since even with it, the game is still fun to play.

Having a post-apocalyptic setting allows the game to feature a dark setting, but it's colorful overall. For a generation that came to be known as full of grey and brown worlds, there's a bit of that here but also a ton of color thanks to all of the car customization options and the world itself. Having areas to drive on liked collapsed bridges and metal allows for many colors to be used for driving surfaces without getting in the way of the setting. Seeing the environment smashed up in real-time is cool, but it's nice to be able to go into the photo mode and appreciate the detail that much more.

The soundtrack is solid and the sound design as a whole is excellent. With a good home theater setup, you can hear the world changing around you and get sucked into what's going on. Having things clank and morph works well visually as it is, but is so much more effective with the addition of audio to make it more immersive. Smashing cars nearby or just having your own car get mangled due to the ever-changing terrain is satisfying thanks to the audio alone, and the use of unlicensed vehicles makes it easy to just let them get smashed to bits ala the Burnout series.

Motorstorm Apocalypse hasn't received much in the way of re-releases and yet has been playable beyond the PS3 thanks to PlayStation Now/PS Plus Premier streaming. It's not a perfect way to play them, but in playing it on the PS4 via streaming, the video quality is about 90% as good as the native game and there are no installs to worry about, so it's an acceptable way to play it and better than the game being lost to time. With nothing to license beyond the soundtrack, hopefully we get a Motorstorm Collection on the PS4 or PS5 one day as they're fantastic games that would stand out a lot in the modern market.