Product Description

Thrill seekers will be racing against skilled rivals and performing gravity defying aerial tricks in Pure, an extreme sports off-road racing videogame. Pure takes off-road racing to a new level. Featuring vertigo-inducing massive aerial jumps and spectacular airborne tricks in photo-realistic real-world locations all over the globe, Pure delivers heart-pounding experiences unique to the genre.

• Choose among a variety of male and female character riders
• Race against deft A.I. opponents or online players (up to 16-player multiplayer)
• Take part in frenetic races and freestyle competitions all over the world
• Developed by award winning development team Black Rock
• Pro-rider Wes Miller, founder of H-Bomb Films, known for showcasing his team's incredible stunts is adviser to the development team to assure the game adheres to the sport's culture and authenticity but still allows creative liberties

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #440 in Computer & Video Games
• Brand: Disney
• Released on: 2008-09-26
• ESRB Rating: Everyone
• Platform: Xbox 360
• Original language: English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Dutch
• Subtitled in: English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Dutch
• Dimensions: .23 pounds

Manufacturer's Description
Thrill seekers will be racing against skilled rivals and performing gravity defying aerial tricks in Pure, an extreme sports off-road racing video. Pure takes off-road racing to a new level. Featuring vertigo-inducing massive aerial jumps and spectacular airborne tricks in photo-realistic real-world locations all over the globe, Pure delivers heart-pounding experiences unique to the genre

Customer Reviews

Pure
So I got this game a few days ago and have been thrashing on it for quite a few hours now, and my impressions of it are very good indeed. The first thing that struck me about the game was that it was completely undemanding, and yet challenging, leaving you with a deep satisfaction - mainly due to the fact that the game is just fun. Fun in the pure meaning of the word. It's one of those games you can just pick up and play for half an hour and just have fun. However, there's also this other aspect to the game which will draw you in over time. An aspect that's very in-depth and logical.

The main part of the game is the world tour allowing you to go all over the world to different countries ranging from Italy to America to New Zealand - over all sorts of different terrains - from grass, to mud, to sand, concrete and more. This mode has you going from track to track simultaneously within the engine category - be it the begining D class engines, slwly building up the extremely fast A and S class engines. As it is, the game slowly gets more and more challenging as you move higher up the ranks and higher up the engine categorys. Before you can start your world tour, you have to create your vehicle. This is no simple creation ranging from a few choice parts and putting them together. The entire bike can be changed and modified ranging from the suspension, bars, wheels, tires, hubs, fans, rests, seat, design, aesthetic cosmetics and everything else. The whole bike has to be made from scratch. On the initial start-up your choice is limited to what you can have - all the different pieces have different effects on how your vehicle performs in the different areas - whether it's tricks, handling, boost, speed, acceleration, etc. As you make your way through the world tour, you unlock even more parts for the vehicle creations and open up new garage slots allowing you to make more and more bikes to fit your personal style of play. When all the pieces are garnered together, there are over 60,000 different possibilities for bikes to make - leaving you with all sorts of different choices.

The gameplay is pretty simple, but not so simple so as to make the game get boring. The handling feels right, and of course your different aspects created on your bike make a big difference to how it works. Similar to SSX from the Playstation 2, you drive around do tricks, land them and get boost. Boost allows you to drive super fast on straights, and getting more boost allows you to do super tricks. The different modes such as freestyle allow you to go around the track over and over again until your fuel levels run out trying to get as many points as possible from doing the tricks. This is all relative, and makes the game extremely fun and something you won't get bored of easily as the number of different trick combinations amount into the thousands. The replay value is also there, getting your times better and better on each track, trying to finish higher than you previously did - and the 100 player online mode is going to be unreal. Tournaments online driving along dirt tracks on all terrain vehicles just seems outrageously fun to me - and the game is.

Really, I can't find any flaws with it at all. The graphics are some of the best yet - with huge ranges of landscape looking over beautiful countryside and vast moutainous regions as you jump hundreds of feet in the air over cliff edges doing absurd tricks. The gameplay is challenging but fun, and the whole thing just feels right. I can't recommend this game highly enough.

Lots of ATV fun. Just needed split-screen offline multiplayer mode.
"Pure" is an ATV-racing game, but it is not a simulator, as you can perform stunts in the game that would be either stupidly dangerous or impossible in real life (hence the warning when you first load the game not to imitate the tricks depicted within).

Before you race you must go to the Garage and use one of the available ATV slots (you can unlock more in the World Tour mode as you progress) to build a vehicle from the ground up using various parts. Different combinations and parts will affect things such as handling, speed, acceleration and how adept the ATV is at performing tricks, whereas other parts (such as the style of handlebars or even the shape, colour and motifs on the ATV) are purely cosmetic. You can either design an ATV part by part manually, or you can do a Quick Race or Quick Freestyle design where the console picks a part for you depending on the discipline you are designing for. You can amend your designs at any point between races, so if you unlock new parts or different upgrades then you can apply them to any ATV by visiting the Garage.

There are three race disciplines in "Pure": Race, Sprint and Freestyle. In Race mode you simply race against opponents while making the most of jumps to perform tricks to fill up the Thrill Bar on the right. To do a trick you simply press A (or B or Y once the Thrill Bar is high enough) together with any direction on the Left Stick, and you can preload a jump by holding down on the Left Stick then pressing up just as you leave the ground; this will give you more height, and thus more time to perform tricks. You can also use the X button to give your ATV a speed boost, although doing so depletes your Thrill Bar. You also lose some of your Thrill Bar every time you crash.

As well as the A, B and Y tricks, if you completely fill up the Thrill Bar you can perform a Special Trick by boosting just before a big jump (many of these jumps have twin torches either side of the apex of the hill from which you jump), preloading and, when airborne, pressing both bumpers together with any direction on the Left Stick. This will completely fill your Thrill Bar again if you successfully do the stunt and land without hitting the ground in mid-trick.

In Sprint mode it's similar to Race, only the tracks are much shorter and jumps you can use to boost your Thrill Bar are few and far between.

In Freestyle your position compared to your opponents is decided, not by your relative position to them on the course, but by what score you can accumulate by doing as many tricks as possible. The more complicated tricks are worth more points, and you must keep doing tricks to avoid losing fuel more quickly (Freestyle is the only discipline in which fuel needs to be taken into account). There are various icons scattered around the track: some will double your score for tricks you do within a short time of driving into the icon, some give you more fuel, others allow you to instantly access a special trick, and another allows you to immediately increase your Thrill Bar to the next available jump style (e.g. if you only had A accessible before you picked this up, it would take your Thrill Bar to B). If your fuel depletes completely the race is over and the person with the highest score wins the event.

"Pure" is an incredibly exciting and fun game to play. The graphics and sound are absolutely sumptuous (notice how your character gets muddy as you ride through the mud sections!), and you really get some good views when you shoot off the apex of a big jump as you hear the air whistle. The game plays really well, too, although sometimes the stick control is not always as precise as you would like it to be when doing stunts (you don't get as much boost if you inadvertently duplicate a trick).

Other gripes with the game include the track occasionally being hard to follow (there's no on-screen map of the track), either by it being too dark because it's in the shade from the sun, or through what looks like a jump actually being a mountain. Another thing that is a shame is that the game has no offline multiplayer mode, which is a shame as a two-player split-screen would have been a lot of fun.

Online you can race against up to fifteen other players in either Race, Sprint or Freestyle events. This mode is every bit as enjoyable as the offline equivalents, although I would recommend that you play the World Tour for long enough to unlock later engine classes such as A or B before taking it too seriously or you will be left standing if you're only at engine class D (the first and only one available to you when you start playing)! (There is an Achievement that you will unlock if you somehow defeat a class-A opponent with a class-D ATV, though!).

What "Pure" does, it does very well, and is different enough to help it stand out from other, more run-of-the-mill driving games.

A Heck of a Lot of Fun
I think the best way to describe Pure is a cross between an arcade racer such as GRiD, an ATV racer such as MotorStorm, and a trick heavy boarding game such as SSX. The combination is certainly an interesting and entertaining one, and when combined with superb graphics, a fun if at times frustrating single player campaign and good online play, Pure is a thrill ride that will have racing fans on the edge of their seats.

Possibly another game that I think in the same vein as Pure is Burnout Paradise. Now bear with me on this one. I found that even though I love Burnout Paradise - it's right up there as one of my Game of the Year picks, and Bikes only make it better - it can be a very frustrating game, and as such I find I can't play it for much more than an hour or so. Same with Pure. This game is such an intense racing experience, at least in single player against the rather tough A.I., that more than 30 minutes of gameplay will leave you breathless.

However this is a testament to just how much fun Pure is. The trick system, although a little basic, works perfectly thanks to its combination of simplicity and versatility. As mentioned before, the game also looks totally gorgeous; from rich coloured environments and tracks to well designed characters and ATV's, Pure may be the best looking racer of the year. The framerate is also totally stable; in fact, the game runs perfectly smoothly on all areas. The simplicity of the gameplay means that this is a very easy game to pick up, although don't be fooled into assuming that it is easy. It isn't. At times it can be incredibly frustrating, and many times the air of my house has been filled with blue cursing caused by crashing just before the end of a race. But this occasional punishing difficulty only serves to add to the sense of accomplishment once you finally win the race. In that sense, Pure is pretty well balanced in terms of difficulty.

In Pure there are three kinds of races; sprints, freestyles and races. Each accentuates a different aspect of the racing experiences. Sprints are pure races, and are all about getting the best race lines and outrunning the opposition. Freestyle is all about getting massive air, hitting some kickass moves and stringing them together in combos to earn massive bonus points. It's not a race, but rather a test to see who can score the most points. Races fall somewhere in between; the best way to win these events is balancing racing strategy and speed with hitting big special tricks. The reason why tricking is important in races is because tricking fills up your boost meter. Filling up more of your boost meter unlocks new more challenging moves which in turn increase your boost even more, until eventually you max out your boost and unlock a special trick, which when used will re-fill your boost bar. So in races the strategy is get a special trick, use up all your boost to get to the head of the pack, hit a special trick to re-fill the boost meter, and then repeat. It's a simple but brilliantly effective gameplay mechanic which really makes Pure a heck of a lot of fun to play.

Pure has a lot of other things going for it. Aside from playing well and looking gorgeous, there is also plenty of customisation; although you can only use a handfull of character models, there are a huge amount of options for building custom ATV's. Also, winning races in World Tour mode unlocks new parts for your ATV, improving performance. It's another simple and fun mechanic. I haven't spent much time in the online, but it seems totally solid; no real lag, match-making is alright, generally it seems sound. Soundtrack is fine, although I've spent most of my game-time with my own music on.

So really it seems like Pure has everything going for it. So why 4-stars and not the full 5? Well, Pure may not have a laundry list of small or medium sized flaws, unlike Fable 2 and Fallout 3, Pure still lags behind the two aforementioned RPG's in my top games of 2008. Don't get me wrong, Pure is fantastic, and I greatly recommend that if you like fast simple fun racers this is a must buy, and I think it's definitely worth a look for anyone. But Pure is a game that is content to be what it is and nothing more. Pure is an excellent ATV racer, and really doesn't do much wrong, but aside from looking oustanding, very little about the game is truly remarkable. It's incredibly solid, and you'll have a lot of fun playing it, but it falls short of 5-star glory due not to any inherant flaw in the games mechanics or presentation, but rather due to the fact that it isn't exactly the most original or exciting game to come along in a good while.

Racing fans with 360's or PS3's have no excuse for not at least giving Pure a fair try - the demo on Xbox Live is what convinced me to buy the game almost immediately, it's so good - but don't expect to play it non-stop all weekend, and don't expect it to bring about a revolution. Pure does a lot of things very well, and it's combined mechanics form a very entertaining game that is definitely worth playing for just about everyone. Big thumbs up.