Describing tracks as intricate actually sells many of them short. There are 16 of them in all, eight more than in the original's release, and some of them are mind-bogglingly clever. Perhaps the best of these is Sugar Rush, a high-speed romp through a sugar plantation that takes you through a cluttered factory and into its lush fields. The ramps are narrow while the turns are sharp, and the robust physics may cause a crate or random tire to get in your way where there hadn't been one before. It's also a tough course with multiple potential paths, and one in which a single mistake within the factory's claustrophobic spaces can cost you the race. On Beachcomber, a sprint across the white sands of a Pacific island getaway is complicated by marshes that get muddier as vehicles drive through them, soaring jumps, and thick vegetation. Even some of the less complex courses, such as Cascade Falls, are a joy to navigate thanks to the varied scenery, a great sense of speed, and significant differences between the branching paths. The high quality of these tracks makes other tracks look downright simple, such as the straightforward race through rocky gorges and mossy caves known as Razorback, or the minimalist watery environs of Colossus Canyon.

Some of the courses turn the spotlight on Pacific Rift's boost function. You can give yourself a kick of speed using nitro boost, but you can't use it too liberally, lest you overheat and explode. A few courses take you near burning pits of lava that further increase this risk but also scatter sprinkler showers about the track, letting you cool off your seared mudplugger. The Scorched track makes brilliant use of this mechanic, combining seemingly endless forks and burning straightaways into a fun ride. Of course, you'll not only struggle with the challenge of the courses themselves, but also with the aggressiveness of other drivers. Using a shoulder button, you can ram into other vehicles, which is a particular delight when behind the wheel of a big rig or monster truck. It's less exciting when you're driving a defenseless ATV and must cope with a crowd of vehicles at a course bottleneck--or dealing with an AI that ignores the best route for its vehicle in favor of forcing you over a cliff.

You will run into some other frustrations, though these aren't frequent and are a by-product of Pacific Rift's loose physics model, which usually makes for rough-and-tumble fun but can be a little too sensitive for its own good. You might crash for no apparent reason when hitting the bottom of a ramp or simply driving from one surface onto another, even when it looks like a clearly even transition and is one you've made a dozen times before without issues. Vehicle handling is also loose, which makes for impossibly high jumps, but also means that making contact with so much as a pebble could cause your buggy to launch into a series of somersaults. This is the case even with large vehicles, such as the new top-heavy monster truck, which feels less solid than you might imagine. These issues are generally avoidable if you have an error-free race, but it does bring a philosophical discrepancy to the forefront: Many of these design elements encourage crashing, but they also demand racing perfection if you want to finish in the top three--a dichotomy with which the game never quite comes to grips.

Fortunately, there are more ways to play than in the original Motorstorm. The Festival takes you through a series of races in which you earn points to advance ranks, and they become tougher as you push through them. Your vehicle selection is usually limited in these contests, which is a great way of introducing you to each vehicle and its preferred routes, though you may wish you had a wider selection if you prefer big rigs but are forced into a buggy. These aren't all simple races, either; In Eliminator races, the racer in last place will explode after a period of time until the field is narrowed to a single survivor, while another race variant may eliminate you if you crash a certain number of times. In Speed challenges, you need to race through a series of checkpoints, but they require a bit of trial and error because you only see one waypoint at a time, which may not give you enough time to make adjustments. Besides, at these times, you are a lone driver, and Pacific Rift is clearly at its best when you face a full pack of challengers.The AI is a challenge, but it can't compare with the thrill of competing with like-minded racers online. Standard and Eliminator races are available, in ranked and unranked variants, and you can even invite friends to a party prior to racing. While the game's official site and other sources indicate support for 16 players, Pacific Rift actually supports 12 drivers. The whole thing is a riot, whether you're aggressively bumping into bikers with your big rig or jumping in a racing car and leaving everyone in your dust. If you'd rather hang out with buddies, you can also take advantage of Pacific Rift's split-screen mode, which supports up to four players. It's fun to race this way, and the frame rate keeps up rather well, even if the segmented screen makes it harder to enjoy the scenery.

And boy, that scenery is beautiful. The green cliffs of Raingod Spires are lush, and such details as a lingering mist set the humid mood. Riptide showcases gorgeous lighting effects and colorful seaside shacks, while the sight of distant waterfalls warms the background. Splatters of mud, splashes of puddles, and a subtle whooshing effect instill a great sense of speed on almost every track. It also performs better than the original Motorstorm: The loading times have been decreased, and moving through the vehicle selections in the menu is no longer agonizingly slow. The sound effects remain top-notch. Engines emit strident growls, and details from the audio cues when boosting to the thuds of your slow-motion crashes are dramatic, as well as just plain awesome. The soundtrack is a collection of boisterous licensed rock from Nirvana, Queens of the Stone Age, and a variety of other bands. You won't always be paying much attention to the music when rushing past your challengers, but like the game, most of it is loud and rowdy.

With such games as DiRT and Pure competing for your attention, Pacific Rift has much larger shoes to fill than before. It's good, then, that the core Motorstorm racing model is so much fun and there are more ways to experience it now. However, the track design is its greatest success; the intricacy and variety of the courses will keep you coming back to explore the possibilities and test your mettle. Aside from a few remaining quibbles, Motorstorm: Pacific Rift is a notable improvement over the original and a blast to play.

The game slows down a bit at this point as Luke Cage takes Spider-Man under his wing to show him some swell moves that will come in handy when dealing with those gangs and everything else Spidey will face. The combat system is simple and accessible enough to let you pull off gorgeous, powerful moves just by button mashing, but it has enough depth that skillful players who familiarize themselves with the countering system and the variety of attacks at Spidey's disposal will get more out of it. Particularly fun is the webstrike, which has you zip up to an opponent and kick off of him into the air, from where you can webstrike the next opponent, chaining together a series of attacks. Some situations make especially good use of this move; at one point, for instance, Spidey must clear a series of snipers on rooftops surrounding a city block in a roof-hopping, webstriking tour de force. As you progress, you earn experience points that you can spend on useful new combos. You can also switch between the red suit and the black suit at any time, but the differences between them, aside from the aforementioned car-throwing ability of the black suit, are relatively minor.

Swinging and zipping your way across Manhattan is easy and tremendously liberating, and Spidey leaps, soars, and dives through the air with a preternatural grace. It's such a joy that you may want to spend some time swinging high above the city enjoying the sense of freedom and ignoring the crimes happening far below, of which there's never any shortage, should you feel like breaking some skulls. A few of the game's more thrilling moments have you putting your webswinging skills to good use as you pursue villains across the city; though the chase sequences aren't especially challenging, the breathless sense of speed (and, in one case, the wake of destruction the villain you're pursuing leaves behind him) makes them a lot of fun.While Treyarch's movie-based Spider-Man games tried to shoehorn a lot of content into the game using side missions that made much of the action seem peripheral, here, everything ties in to the game's excellent story, resulting in a cohesive, compelling experience from start to finish. As in past games, you'll swing around the city to take on various missions, which are given here by a selection of characters from the Marvel universe. Whether you deal primarily with heroes or with villains depends on some choices you make. From time to time, you'll have to decide whether to do the moral thing or to give in to the temptations of Peter's dark side. These choices don't have much impact, though, because the missions you undertake are largely the same regardless of whom you're undertaking them for, though there are a few different endings to the game that vary based on whether you're more aligned with the red suit or with the black. You can also call on an ally for support at almost any time, and whether you're joined by a hero or a villain will also depend on the decisions you make, but you probably won't feel the need to use this feature much.

There's an excellent variety to the missions and to the enemies you fight that keeps things from growing stale. You'll take on easily dispatched thugs, hulking mechs, and enemies who fly around on Green Goblin-esque gliders. Combat against airborne enemies is especially thrilling, because the camera generally does a terrific job of circling around to stay focused on the action, creating a dizzying sense of altitude as you see the city spinning below. There are also a number of great boss fights, including a fight with Vulture that has you swinging from flying enemy to flying enemy to reach him, and a knock-down, drag-out brawl against Wolverine, who doubts your identity and so will periodically quiz you on obscure bits of Spider-Man lore to determine if you're the real Peter Parker, which is a nice bit of fan service for hardcore Spider-Man fans.

It's in the game's final act, though--when New York is once again the symbiote-infested, SHIELD-occupied city glimpsed in the game's introduction--that the missions become outstanding. Pockets of humans need to be rescued from buildings and rooftops throughout the city, and there's a real sense of desperation as you accompany SHIELD APCs and hovercraft and fight to protect the civilians from oncoming swarms of symbiotes that you can see approaching even through walls, thanks to your handy spider sense. The symbiotes are relentless and a bit creepy, and the feeling of dread is enhanced by the gloomy red sky and the desperate skirmishes taking place all over the city between SHIELD troops and symbiotes.

Red skies or blue, the city looks beautiful, especially when you're swinging high above it. You can see the skyscrapers of Manhattan stretching far off into the distance, with light reflecting convincingly off their surfaces. The city still looks sharp when you're on the ground, though it's not especially detailed and doesn't have the amount of activity you'd expect. You'll occasionally see odd things, like people walking up against walls or vehicles with their front wheels on top of the car in front of them, which can be distracting, but they don't happen often enough to severely impact the experience. The Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions look nearly identical, though we did encounter a few instances of screen tearing on the PS3, which seemed to be absent on the 360.The sound is generally good, with some strong performances from the voice cast. Spider-Man delivers his so-bad-they're-funny (sometimes) one-liners with great geeky charm, while also giving a sense of the inner conflict he's experiencing in his struggle with the black suit. The music is sweeping and cinematic, but the best accompaniment to Spidey's swinging is the whistling of the wind you hear when there's no music at all. The sound has its technical issues, though; music and dialogue will sometimes cut out for a moment, and dialogue during cutscenes occasionally gets out of sync with the action.

Web of Shadows doesn't break the mold of earlier Spider-Man games, but its cohesive, engaging story, varied missions, and consistently thrilling action sure make it a big improvement for the series. The campaign is a good 12 hours long, and the gameplay is solid enough to hold up to a second play-through if you want to find out how it ends when you choose a different path. There are a number of minor technical issues, but they're far outweighed by the sheer enjoyment of the gameplay. Web of Shadows delivers nearly everything you could want in a Spider-Man game.