hey there! word of advice, this review is part of a series of reviews where i took a look at every game in the wipE'out" series of racing games. they used to all be hosted on my cohost, but ever since... y'know, cohost got shut down, they haven't had a real home. instead, i'll point you in the direction of my backloggd to get caught up. here's a list of the links to each review:

1. wipE'out"
2. Wipeout XL
3. wipE'out" 64
4. wipEout 3
5. wipEout Fusion

aha, here's my home turf. when i first got into wipeout, it was via the PSP, and as such i have a bit of a soft spot for the portable entries in the series. a bit of foreshadowing, but one of the two PSP games is my favorite game in the series.

this is not that one. wipeout pure (or, stylized as wipE'out purE) was the first of the portable wipeouts, and was actually a launch title for the PSP in north america. there's a lot of new features that Pure introduced to the series, which i can respect at least. it's the first of the "modern" wipeouts to me, which i thought was going to be fusion. what separates classic and modern wipeout to me is that the classic games (fusion and below) feel a lot looser and floatier, while the modern games (pure and above) are a lot heavier and more realistic. you could do some seriously messed up stuff in the old wipeouts, jump over whole corners, do sick flips, but nothing like that in the newer games. it's all about pure (heh) movement and optimization. i think each has their place in the series, but Pure's physics definitely didn't sell me on the new setup unfortunately. i dunno, i get wanting to feel realistic, but Pure feels a little TOO sluggish. turning is a nightmare on the higher speed classes, even when running Feisar (the best turning ships in the series) like i usually do. the later modern games definitely improved on this, but Pure's execution just didn't do it for me. on top of the new physics, there's a few new gameplay differences. no more pit lane for recovering shield energy, instead you can now absorb weapon pickups to recover instead, and that's your only option. there's also a few new movement options, such as double-tapping an airbrake to do a sideshift, or tapping left-right-left (or right-left-right) in midair to perform a barrel roll, giving the player a significant speed boost in return for some shield energy.

well, besides the new physics, another new addition is DLC. sure, the PS2 could connect to the internet using the broadband adapter, but that's like saying you can connect a cereal box to the internet. you can try all you want, but in the end nothing is really gonna support it. the PSP and DS were where the online revolution really began in gaming, at least in my opinion, because those were the first consoles to do it outside of the dialup era. now, players could simply connect their systems to wifi, which simplified things a ton. not to mention, this was also the start of internal storage. (again, i know, technically the PS2 and OG Xbox did this, but again, cereal box analogy.) the PSP really was revolutionary in the portable sphere in a lot of ways, and while i will say that the DS definitely had it beat in terms of exclusive, hard hitting games, i still appreciate the PSP a ton for what it was able to do at the time. tangent aside, the DLC was a huge part of this game's identity, and is the most commonly praised aspect of it from what ive seen. 12 new tracks, 8 new ships, and tons of unique skins were added over the course of 4 different DLC packs, and there were a lot of other extra DLC packs added for other reigons. unfortunately, in this day and age, a lot of internet stuff doesn't work on the PSP anymore, and there are no fanservers as far as i know. there's definitely ways to get the DLC content through modding, but i haven't dipped my toes into that, since for some reason i always struggle to get DLC working with CFW on PSP specifically. i remember back when i first got my PSP, i tried downloading the DLC for LittleBigPlanet, but i could never get it to work. with all that said, DLC wasn't all the wifi was good for, because the future was here, and the future was online play! that's right, Pure was the first wipeout to have online play, with up to 8 people over wifi! except, as i already said, the future-future is here now, and the servers are no longer functional, so i didn't get to experience this aspect unfortunately. i mean, multiplayer has never really been wipeout's forte, so i don't feel like i'm missing out all that much, but it's still sad to see it gone. im sure this was tons of fun back in the day though, and i'd love to see it up and running again sometime.

it's time to talk gamemodes. what's in play here? well, there's the classics of course, Single Race, which acts like it did in WO3. do a race and depending on your final position, you'll potentially get a medal for your efforts. Gold for first, Silver for second, and bronze for third. getting gold medals nets you new ships, tracks, and other unlocks which are used to progress in the game. but while i really enjoyed WO3's campaign, Pure just didn't sit with me quite the same way. again, i think its due to the gameplay, it just doesn't hit the way WO3 did, and i got pretty bored of it after playing for a while. speed classes are back after being absent from Fusion at least, and like... maybe i just suck ass, but the higher speed classes feel impossible to control. i couldn't get anything done above Vector here, sorry folks. Tournament is pretty much the AG League mode from Fusion, and it sucks. you play through a set of four tracks in a row, and that's it. Time Trial is my bread and butter, and it's alright here, since you can't really mess up Time Trials in a racing game. Zone returns from Fusion, and it finally gets to spread its wings in a good game. i think this is a very good iteration of Zone, it's fast-paced, focused, and is a fun endurance-based challenge. and finally there's Freeplay, which is pretty much just "race for as long as you like by yourself". it's good for practicing new tracks or going for fast lap times, and i think it's a good addition. and... that's it. that's all the modes in the game. on top of only having 16 tracks included in the base game (8 all new tracks, 4 returning and 4 zone) there's really not all that much content to go through with pure. again, i know there's DLC, but i'm not bothering with that right now. this lead to me feeling like Pure was kind of... underwhelming in terms of content.

this brings us to our final stop with pure, as always with these reviews, the soundtrack. returning for the first time since... geez, Wipeout 1, is Cold Storage, along with new faces such as Drumattic Twins and Aphex Twin, the latter of which would become a series staple from there on out. CS and AT only get one track each, (Naks Acid and Onyx respectively) which is unfortunate, but they're both great tracks nonetheless. along with the base game tracks, however, there's also a large portion of DLC additions to the OST, a lot of which focused on specific reigons of Europe. this is a pretty cool idea, but i didn't have a spare 4 hours to listen to the gargantuan amount of DLC music there is. the base OST has 21 tracks, technically 24 if you count the album only tracks. how many DLC songs are there? THIRTY-FIVE. yeah, well over double the base lineup. maybe i'll listen to all of them eventually, but there simply isn't enough time in the day. hey, if there's anything we can always count on with Wipeout, it's that the soundtracks are always homeruns.

while i can appreciate a lot of the new additions Pure brings to the table, it simply didn't hit any of the right nerves in the way i like Wipeout to do. while being a very impressive game graphically (especially as a launch PSP game! the PSP can produce some pretty muddy looking games at times but Pure totally rocks it in this department) i simply just didn't find any of the content in the game to be all that interesting, especially compared to the heights of Wipeout 3. at the very least, i can give Pure a point for being a departure from the lows of Wipeout Fusion and bringing the series back to what its meant to be: true, pure racing.