Like bodybuilding, lawn bowls and rugby involving the Lions, NASCAR racing is not a sport. Despite entertaining legions of mulleted followers and being the perfect event to take your sister to on a date, the mindless pursuit of what is effectively just one long left turn cannot honestly be compared to numerous other types of racing that actually involve strategy, skill, and not being related to anyone named Skeeter.

Motorstorm: Apocalypse sadly falls into this questionable category. Despite its huge variety of vehicles and some of the most impressive visuals ever seen in a racing title, the lack of solid racing mechanics and mediocre presentation make this third outing in the Motorstorm franchise feel far too heavy on spectacle and way too light on any kind of substance.

Speaking of spectacle, Apocalypse has it in bucket loads. Set in a nondescript US city during the ups and downs of a devastating earthquake, the opportunity for creating some seriously impressive tracks has not been wasted by developer Evolution Studios. Suspensions bridges whip about like unrestrained garden hoses on full blast and entire skyscrapers topple right in front of you to race over, all complete with a ridiculous amount of debris, particle effects, techno lights and even small mobs of angry protesters.

While this is all suitably impressive on a pure eye-candy level the need to fill absolutely every available pixel with some attention-grabbing filigree ends up detracting from the racing action rather than contributing to it; this is made even worse by tracks that are so over-designed that it’s often difficult to distinguish a crack in the road that you can drive over smoothly and one that’ll fling you off that superbike faster than you can hit the restart button.

I often found myself face-planting into a barrier because of all the distractions being flung about, or going through some wooden boards that are breakable at one instance on the track but rock solid at another point. While the Motorstorm franchise has ostensibly always been just as much about surviving the race as it has about winning it, Apocalypse’s slaps you with a few too many cheap crashes to make any play session longer than a couple of races a highly frustrating experience.

This could all be overlooked if it weren’t for the questionable race mechanics. For me a racing title must absolutely, above all else, be fair to the gamer; rubber-banding and variable AI intelligence be damned. Apocalypse decides to chuck this foolish idea of fairness out the window though and instead employ some very strange racer behaviour that would actually benefit immensely from some of NASCAR’s aforementioned predictability.

This becomes most apparent when respawning after a crash, as sometimes I went from 8th all the way down to 15th in a nanosecond, but other times I’d mysteriously jump from 6th all the way to 1st. Now, why plunging off the top of a high-rise building to my death results in me being awarded pole position is beyond me, but it’s this kind of sloppy foundation that makes Apocalypse feel terribly unbalanced.

Suspect AI also reared its cheating head during repeated play of a track: there were times when I’d finish a race in second place only a few ticks behind the leader, but when I replayed the same event I’d come second again with my time a couple seconds faster but the racer in first place, an unbelievably quick learner it seems, had miraculously beaten his previous time by over 20 seconds.

Things also get pretty lonely at times when racers separate out often leaving you a fair bit ahead of the losers and equally as far from the pack leaders if you’ve had one too many wipeouts. This can result in events that just feel like you going through the motions, mashing the throttle as you go round and round waiting for the finish line to appear. It can be quite a spectacle with a huge bunch of vehicles all jostling through a corner or into a narrow stretch, but this too loses excitement when everyone goes their own way or when you realise that the sideswiping move (where you can smash an opponent on either side of you) is completely and totally useless.

Also disappointing is the abysmally awful art direction. In fact, the entire animated comic book feel of the character designs and cutscenes could’ve been done better by a three-legged cat on LSD using finger paints. It’s lame, childish, and completely against the vibe the actual game is trying to create, and it’s all made worse by a script that’s so laughably corny that I found myself skipping every single scene that popped up lest my mind be instantly dumbed down by such trash. Again, this isn’t crucial to the gameplay itself, but it’s difficult to get caught up in the atmosphere when its built on such ridiculous foundations.

Multiplayer fares slightly better not just with the addition of human opponents but with perks that provide various advantages during races and the option to place wagers on the outcome, an interesting twist being that you only have to beat the player you’ve bet on rather than winning the race outright. There are also challenges, medals and accolades to work through, and some impressively quick servers made the entire online experience a lot better for me than the shoddy single player campaign.

Overall, Motorstorm: Apocalypse is a bit of mixed bag. The single player mode starts out great and the sheer exhibitionism of the insane tracks is exciting and satisfying for a while, but the dodgy racing mechanics and frustrating crashes soon become stale. The new selection of vehicles is great and the game officially boasts the largest selection of any racing title to date, but this isn’t enough to detract from the overall mediocrity of the title.

Even the sexy looking destruction feels blasé quickly, and I constantly watched buildings and other scenery exploding around me wishing that it would take a page from Split Second’s book and actually add something to the racing, or even take a few hints from NFS Hot Pursuit and let you bring some genuine skill to the party. Sure, multiplayer might be worth the price of admission if you’re a dedicated online gamer or if you’re looking for something very arcade-y to waste time with when you have mates over, but if you’re after anything less than a rather shallow ‘round-and-round’ racer then you’d honestly be better off going to watch some NASCAR.

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