MotorStorm - updated hands-on

The trucks are a lot more beginner-friendly, as you'll be able to charge over obstacles and through bits of scenery more easily than you would on a bike. It's also good news that you can take a lot more damage than the motorbikes, smashing up your hood realistically and leaving parts of your truck scattered across the landscape for other racers to trip over. The trucks aren't quite as good at taking all the track's tight turns, which isn't surprising. But that hardly matters when you can ram your competitors - especially the ones on motorcycles - off the track, which here often means being slammed off the edge of the mesa or flying into a rocky cliff face.

Crashes happen a lot in MotorStorm. Like, every 15 seconds. If you've ever played one of the Burnout games, you've already got a good idea of what to expect: lots of spectacularly blazing crash porn, as your flying vehicle splinters and tears into hyper-detailed shreds in one brilliant, slow-motion death spiral. Then you'll be plopped back on the track, good as new and ready to race again.

The crashes look amazing and are usually fun to watch, and the coolness is magnified by pausing mid-flight, which lets you pan the camera around and closely examine the damage to your flaming wreckage. However, since you get a slow-motion sequence literally every time you wipe out, it gets repetitive, and there doesn't appear to be a way to skip them.