Pure

Solitary Whistling accompanies your rocketing descent towards the ground. Trying to play the air guitar whilst standing on your handle bars, you notice the mud is approaching far more rapidly than you'd calculated. You hold your breath and wince as you watch your mangled body strike the race track at lethal speed, get thrown from your quad bike and subsequently trampled like a flimsy ragdoll. But you don't care; all your bones are miraculously still intact, and so with newly acquired Conan-levels of adrenaline you kick your ATV back into gear, zooming off towards the next ludicrous, physics-defying jump in a furious splatter of mud.

This is the general template that Black Rock's Pure follows - a trickheavy, high-jumping dirt racer on par with SSX or the PlayStation 3's Motorstorm. The sweeping, gratuitous landscapes are graphically impressive and make the 30-odd tracks a joy to ride and familiarise yourself with. Listening to Pendulum whilst flying through the air at 150ft above mountainous Thailand, doing over-the-top things that aren't be physically possible is sometimes breathtaking, even if you then stack it and land face first in the mud at 50mph.

Infuriating loading times are a major issue. The 5:33 wait (yeah, seriously) I encountered at one point had me certain I'd crashed the PC. However, if you've got the patience of a sedated Ghandi and a gamepad to replace the fiddly keyboard controls, then Pure is a fun, easy to pick up and genuinely addictive racer.