Remember when games didn’t take themselves too seriously and had completely ridiculous worlds in them where the developers had let their imaginations run wild? I miss those days. I miss Ridge Racer and Daytona USA and I also miss SSX. Those mad tracks with crazy jumps and stomach churning drops down mountains and hillsides. They really were the bee’s knees.

Say hello to Pure.

Pure takes the crazy jumps, drops and environments from SSX and switches snowboards for quad bikes and snow for mud, gravel and sand (umm… and there’s snow too). Pure is a hyper-fast racing game where depending on the game mode the aim is to either come first by crossing the finish line first, or come first by getting the biggest score.

Whilst you are racing around waiting for the next nutty jump, you can use the boost you gained from filling the gauge up to boost you even faster around the track which ultimately means you’ll be getting much higher on the jumps thus meaning bigger scores. Land badly though and you’ll lose your extra trick buttons so it’s a classic risk versus reward mechanic.

You are able to design and build your own bike from a huge array of parts. You can either build a Race bike, which has good handling, or a Stunt bike, which is better for tricks, or make something in-between. There are sliders for each part telling you its rating for Speed, Acceleration, Tricks, Handing and so on, so you can tune the bike to your needs. The tools is actually rather deep with lots of options, so a fantastic feature is the auto-build mode, where it will build a Race or Stunt bike for you. Even better though, is that you can interrupt it at any time and fit specific parts yourself – very neat.

Another issue with the game is that you will find it much harder if you play the game the way the tutorials tell you to. They tell you to pre-load every jump to get maximum air and to do tricks whenever possible, and to make sure to use a Stunt bike over a Race bike for Freestyle Mode. These are all complete lies. I found it easier to use a Race bike throughout the entire game and only preload when racing in Freestyle events - and never in Race or Sprint events – you simply lose too much time in the air.

If you were desperate for a quick fix racing game then Pure will fill your needs for a long weekend, but don’t expect to be playing it much after that, it’s just too short and doesn’t have enough game modes to keep you interested for long periods of time. There is massive potential for a kick-ass sequel though, and some of those tracks are fabulous to race around.