Racing games have never been a huge source of enjoyment for me, so
Motorstorm RC falls squarely in the category of 'if it hadn't been free on PS Plus I wouldn't have bothered' for me. It was actually a fairly fortuitous set of circumstances for the game that resulted in me playing it even beyond that; it turned up as a freebie at a time when I was just starting to run out of cheap and free Vita games to catch up on, and at a point when I had pretty much no disposable income to go out and buy anything new.
All that said, I'm glad I did end up playing this, because it feels and looks like a much-needed update of
Micro Machines, probably the only racing series I've ever truly liked. It didn't even occur to me that RC might mean 'remote control' (blame the UK for that, I guess - I've never heard anybody use the phrase 'RC car' outside of American TV shows), and when I found out that's what the game was all about, I was happily surprised. Not with the controls, mind - by using both analogue sticks, one to steer and one to accelerate, it mimics the way a real toy car is controlled. Bun dat. Get in the menu, set the acceleration and braking to the shoulder buttons and away you go. That small gripe aside, it eases you in nicely, controls beautifully (once you get your head around the way the steering corresponds to the camera angle, which doesn't take long), and for quite a while, offers up a nice mixture of challenge and fun, thanks to its smart mixture of game modes. It's the kind of game you can blaze through most of in three hours and wonder where the time went, and there can't be many situations in console gaming where that's not a plus.
Sadly, the gameplay starts to fall apart a little in the later stages. The first problem comes with the sliding challenges, which are explained really poorly in-game and just aren't anywhere near as fun as the races, hot laps, or pursuits. The second comes with the way the difficulty increases as the levels advance. This has always been a bugbear of mine with racing games - why can't they just make the AI more of a challenge rather than put you in a worse car?
Motorstorm RC sidesteps this a little by adding so-called 'super car' challenges right at the end of the game as unlockables when everything else has been completed, but in the last few races building up to that point, you get dumped in a car that can barely steer and that gets spun out by even the tiniest contact with another driver. That's not increasing the difficulty, that's increasing the frustration and annoyance. I've seen plenty of other racing games that are worse for that than this is, but it's still deeply disappointing that a game that gets so many other things right falls into this laziest of traps.
Motorstorm RC still ranks as the most fun I've had with a racing game in a very long time; it's just a shame that it ends up hamstrung by its own lack of imagination after a while.