When firing up a racing title hailing from the garage of Black Rock Studios (formerly Climax), you can usually bet that the ensuing gameplay will be one of painstaking realism and detailed simulation. But this time, the developer behind the MotoGP series has decided to tone down the simulation elements of its new ATV racer, Pure, while simultaneously giving it a heavy dose of the extraordinary.

In Pure, you and 15 other fictional riders will take on 36 different tracks that span across a variety of the most vertical environments in the world. In the case of our demo, we spent time with two different locations: Timber Falls, a high altitude mountain range, and Ocotillo Falls, a treacherous desert containing a graveyard for jet liners. Tracks such as Timber Falls are made all the more intense with breathtaking vistas that sport draw distances of up to 30 kilometers. This gives a very natural sense of vertigo when launching a four wheeler hundreds of feet into the air as the camera angles downward, at some points showing off the entire mountain range.

Now, when we say hundreds of feet in the air, we mean it, because Black Rock wants you to have the most fun possible when navigating elaborate tracks like Timber Falls. Their goal is to create an “exaggerated reality," by letting players acquire ridiculous heights, and busting out some sick tricks while hanging amongst the clouds. But you won’t be pulling off no-hand supermans from the get go, as the game challenges you to start off with simpler maneuvers first using the A button, and after nailing a few of those, working your way up into the expert tricks using Y. Don’t believe for a second that Black Rock as gone all Tony Hawk on us, as tricks will factor into your racing performance through a boost meter that will fill during your skilled acrobatics. Pressing the X button at any time will allow you kick things into high gear, leaving your opponents with plenty of individually rendered pebbles flying into their faces.

So as you can see, the stunt system is married to the racing gameplay by having it earn you that extra edge over the competition. If you do happen to take a spill, and there was plenty of that going on during our initial play session, the game keeps the action rolling forward by restarting you moving at full speed, so there‘s never a slow moment during a race.

Adding more depth to the concept of boosting are the many branching paths found throughout each of the tracks. Certain routes will contain more jumps, and thus opportunities for you maximize your boost meter. Heading in another direction however will lead to a shortcut, albeit one that can contain thick mud such as in our race on Timber falls, which did enjoyably adhere to our rider but also slowed us down, causing the need for, you guessed it, boosting. We were told that boosting is also key to exploration, giving you that extra push off of a jump to areas you may not have been able to reach otherwise. This not only adds a bit of a quasi-platforming element to the game, but also gives you motivation to return to the same tracks and search for better ways of racing them.