ATV Offroad Fury 4: The Fury is Back! Company: Sony Interactive Entertainment America As the title indicates, ATV Offroad Fury 4 is the fourth installment of the popular racing franchise for the PS2, sort of. For those who have not been keeping up on the crazy license swapping that has been taking place with the franchise of late, allow us to briefly recap. Rainbow Studios (with publisher Microsoft) had earned a reputation for developing incredibly rich offroad racing games for the PC in the late 1990’s. When the PS2 first came on the scene, Sony lured Rainbow away from Microsoft and their first joint effort, ATV Offroad Fury, was a smashing success. The combination of Sony and Rainbow would go on to produce the equally successful sequel, ATV Offroad Fury 2, before parting ways. Rainbow would begin working with THQ on the Unleashed series of offroad race games while the ATV Offroad Fury name would stay behind with Sony as the publisher. Only this time, beginning with ATV Offroad Fury 3, Climax Studios was filling in as the programming team. Climax is back again in ATV Offroad Fury 4 with a host of new editions to boast about. Among them is a new Story Mode, which allows the player the ability to select a male or female rider to enter into competition events in effort to earn sponsorship/ championships. While not a new concept to the racing genre, Climax does a respectable job bringing a career mode to the Offroad Fury series with a good deal of drama and interaction. Most impressive is use of actual video clips to tie together the storyline. Whether or not the next feature is actually an improvement is questionable: Stealing from the MX vs. ATV Unleashed concept, ATV 4 offers players a chance to race 29 vehicles in addition to the classic ATV. Among them are trophy tracks, buggies, and motorcycles. While this may be an improvement to variety, I for one prefer the devotion to the vehicle that made this series so popular in the first place: The ATV. This latest trend of being able to race just about every vehicle under the sun only depreciates the seriousness of the developer’s intentions and moves a step closer to the arcade side of things over the simulator type precision that Rainbow had made popular in the beginning of the series. A welcome addition to ATV 4 is the new track editor which allows the player the ability to create and race on custom-built Supercross and circuit tracks. This feature alone, while a bit time consuming to master initially, adds incredible replay value to the game by offering a limitless number of playable tracks. Also noteworthy is the new Point-to-Point Race Mode which introduces players to Baja-style racing with huge free-roaming environments where players choose from multiple routes to complete courses. Finally, ATV Offroad Fury 4 has the ability to connect with ATV Offroad Fury Pro for the PSP, allowing game setups and tracks to be swapped between the two versions. Graphically, ATV Offroad Fury 4 improves upon it’s processor by streaming environments directly off the DVD-Rom rather than uploading the tracks into the PS2’s memory. As a result, nearly all pop-up draw in distance is eliminated and the backgrounds are loaded with activity and color. The framerate is smooth and precise with no noticeable glitching or dips in fps (frames per second) to report. The gameplay feels very similar to Climax’s last effort (ATV 3) which is to say, slightly faster and a bit more arcade-like than the smoother and more precise efforts of the earlier Rainbow Studios projects. Look for a full review soon! -Jay G. Money, GameVortex Communications AKA Jason Giacchino Related Links: ATV Offroad Fury 4 Official Site