MotorStorm: Apocalypse arrived on the PlayStation 3 in March 2011, and it did so the hard way. The fourth game in Evolution Studios’ racing series, and the third built for the PlayStation 3, moves the festival off dirt and rock and into a collapsing city. That is the whole pitch, and it is a good one.
Trailer, via PlayStation.
The City Is the Star
The setting is The City, an apocalyptic urban area based on the West Coast of the United States, specifically California’s Bay Area. It is the first urban setting in MotorStorm history, which until now had traded on natural environments. Evolution Studios built more than 40 tracks through the ruins, and the ruins do not sit still.
Bridges buckle and twist. Buildings collapse. Rifts open up beneath the vehicles as they drive. Tornadoes and active earthquakes reshape the route in real time, and helicopters crash through buildings while you are trying to hold a line. The tracks are not backdrops. They are the event.
Three Racers, Three Days, Three Difficulties
Apocalypse is more story-driven than the games before it. The MotorStorm Festival unfolds over three days and is told from the perspective of three participants: Mash, labelled “The Rookie”; Tyler, labelled “The Pro”; and Big Dog, labelled “The Veteran.”
Each racer also represents a difficulty level of gameplay, and each sees different parts of the catastrophe unfold across the three-day festival. The single-player mode spreads 40 tracks across those three tiers, with each tier focused on one racer’s story. It is a clean structure, and it does the work the series needed.
Factions, Firearms, and a Helicopter
A new challenge in Apocalypse is people. The City houses two factions, the Crazies and DuskLite, who vie for survival, and both make racing worse in the best way.
The Crazies loot broken buildings, break into fights on the streets, steal cars, try to slam racers off the road, and attack racers with firearms. DuskLite is a private military company attempting to enforce order, and its involvement creates hazards of its own, including an attack helicopter firing missiles onto the track. The result is a race where the environment is only half the threat.
New Metal and a Boost Gauge
The vehicle roster grows. New additions include supercars, superbikes, hot hatches, muscle cars and choppers. Customization covers vinyls, vehicle parts, and perks that modify handling, boosting and offensive abilities. Players can also design their own rules for online tournaments.
The smartest new mechanic is air cooling. In Pacific Rift, driving through cool water sped up the rate at which boost cooled. In Apocalypse, releasing the accelerator over a large jump drops the boost temperature gauge faster. It is a small change that rewires how you read a jump.
The Crazies try to impede the progress of the racers.
A Launch That Got Rearranged
The release did not go to plan. Apocalypse launched in Europe on 16 March 2011, but Sony Computer Entertainment UK delayed the UK release set for 18 March following the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami in Japan.
| Region | Planned date | Actual date |
|---|---|---|
| Europe | 16 March 2011 | 16 March 2011 |
| Australia | 17 March 2011 | 17 March 2011 |
| UK | 18 March 2011 | 31 March 2011 |
| North America | 12 April 2011 | 3 May 2011 |
The Australian launch went ahead as planned on 17 March, but Sony announced further shipments to that country would be halted in the wake of the disaster. The North American date of 12 April was pushed as well. Sony later confirmed 31 March for the UK and 3 May for North America.
Multiplayer, Then and Now
The multiplayer package was generous at launch. Locally, up to four-player splitscreen. Online, up to two-player splitscreen, plus 16-player racing, vehicle customization, performance perks and wagering.
That online side has an expiry date. The multiplayer servers closed on 27 August 2018. Anyone coming to Apocalypse now gets the single-player festival and local splitscreen, and nothing else. It is worth saying plainly, because the game was built to be played with other people.
What Holds Up and What Does Not
Seven point eight out of ten is the right number, and the reason is that Apocalypse solves a problem the series had been circling for years. MotorStorm had always been about terrain, and terrain is finite. By dropping the festival into a city that is actively destroying itself, Evolution Studios found a way to make the track itself the antagonist.
The three-racer structure is the other real win. Tying Mash, Tyler and Big Dog to difficulty tiers gives the campaign a reason to exist beyond a list of events, and letting each see a different slice of the same three days makes a second playthrough feel like new information rather than a harder version of the same thing.
The factions are where the ambition runs ahead of the execution. The Crazies and DuskLite add chaos, and chaos is the point, but an attack helicopter firing missiles onto the track is a hazard you cannot read the way you read a buckling bridge. When the track changes, you adapt. When a missile arrives, you react. Those are different games, and Apocalypse never quite decides which one it is.
The launch window cost the game something it never got back. A title about a city enduring a massive natural disaster, released in the weeks after the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, was always going to be handled carefully, and Sony’s decision to delay the UK release and halt Australian shipments was the right call. It also meant Apocalypse never had a clean worldwide moment.
The server shutdown in 2018 is the sharper loss. Sixteen-player racing, wagering, custom tournament rules, perks that changed how a vehicle handled and boosted: that was a full second game bolted onto the festival, and it is gone. What remains is a strong single-player campaign and a splitscreen mode, which is more than many 2011 racers can offer, but less than Apocalypse shipped with.
What matters most, looking back, is the setting. The City, built on the Bay Area, with its rifts and collapsing buildings and buckling bridges, is the single best idea Evolution Studios had in this series, and it is the reason Apocalypse is remembered at all. The racing underneath is familiar MotorStorm: heavy vehicles, boost management, a festival structure. The city is what makes it strange.
The air-cooling tweak is a tiny rule change that turns every ramp into a decision. It is the kind of detail that separates a racing game you finish from one you keep playing.
MotorStorm: Apocalypse is not the best game in its series, and it is not the most polished racer of its generation. It is the most interesting one. A festival in a dying city, told three ways, with the ground opening under your wheels, is a premise nothing else on the PlayStation 3 attempted. The Crazies and DuskLite do not fully earn their place, and the online half of the game is dead. The rest of it holds.
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