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I’m not normally a huge fan of sports games.  Most of the time it feels like the same thing I’ve played before, over and over.  I mean, do we really need a new Madden every year?  For a while there, that’s exactly what we were getting.  Whether we needed it–whether we WANTED it–or not, we were getting it.  Sure, they’d tack on enough new features to make it feel slightly different, but it was still the same basic concept over and over again.

One place where the difference almost feels necessary is racing games.  And today, after trying Pure, I can say that sometimes, the same old same old is exactly what we need.

In Pure, you play as one of a group of racers, out for glory on the Pure circuit for their own reasons.  There’s a brother and sister rivalry, there’s the son of a seventies rock star who wants to make a name for himself and get out of his father’s shadow, there’s a Japanese wildman who just has a gift, there’s a girl who worked three jobs to afford her own ATV, and so on and so forth right down the line.  But these stories are little more than window dressing for the main event–getting on your fully customizable ATV, going to some of the most beautiful places on earth, and blasting through them at somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred miles an hour on a motorized seat with wheels that doesn’t have so much as a roll bar.

When I say “fully customizable”, I mean it–you’ll build an ATV literally from scratch, starting with the frame, going through such necessary parts as brakes and engines and even working your way up to such superfluities as hand guards and Nerf bars.  You’ll even get to decide the COLOR of most components, and add on decals and stickers and everything but a Hello Kitty bobblehead on the handlebars.  Which would be kind of cool, but I digress.

And when I was talking about a roll bar, you’ll want one.  These beautiful places–a mountainous island in Italy, an old logging camp in Montana, a crater in New Zealand–have lots of steep drops and big angles that you will, not surprisingly, use as jumps.  I’m no mathematician, but if I’m getting the scale right some of these drops are a couple hundred feet up.  And being the sort that you are, of course, you’ll take these huge drops as an opportunity to flip or spin your ATV in mid-flight or jump off it temporarily or do all sorts of irresponsible and potentially fatal things in mid-flight.  These are called “tricks”, and you will have the opportunity to do plenty of them.  The interesting thing is, if you DON’T do these tricks, you will be refused access to your nitrous oxide boosters, which is likely to put you at a serious disadvantage in the race.

This of course makes no sense in the real world–normally nitrous boosters are on a switch, and the switch really doesn’t care if you “catch mad sick air” before you use it, but this is a game so allowances have to be made.  Also, nitrous tanks will not refill mid-race because they have such respect for your ability to perform tricks…but again, game, allowances, yadda yadda.

But the key thing to take away here is that Pure is an unsettlingly adrenaline-fuelled experience.  The next-gen graphics really do help underscore the beauty of your surroundings, while at the same time also giving you the feeling of being about to wet yourself after a couple hundred foot drop off the side of a cliff.  While you’re hanging off the back of the ATV doing something called a “Superman”.  The music is a fair accompanyment, but I’d like to hear a little more variety from some more recognizable names.  Come on, guys–was Blink 182 that busy?  A little Offspring, perhaps?

Still, Pure is a surprising experience that should get your heart pumping as you do horrifying and ridiculous things you’d never do in real life.  At the very least, a fun rental, and if you’re already into ATVs then just go whole hog and get the game.