There are jumps, and then there are jumps. The former you can find in nearly any off-road racing game these days: tiny little heaps of dirt that toss your bike or ATV in the air for a few feet, then bring you back down to earth with little more than a clank and a cloud of dust. As for those other kinds of jumps--the gravity-defying, seat-of-your-pants suicide leaps that feature the kind of airtime usually reserved for base jumpers--well, there's only one place to find those kind of jumps: in Pure, the new off-road racing game from publisher Disney Interactive and developer Black Rock Studio. We first saw the game back in February and could already tell that this was a different take on the well-worn ATV racing genre. Earlier this week we got an updated look at the game--though sadly, no hands-on yet--and are happy to report that things are coming along nicely.

　　Jumps don't get much bigger than in Pure.

　　Pure is going to have some fun features to keep you busy when you're off the track, but the game is at its best when the tires are spitting dirt. During the demo, we were treated to updated looks at a couple of the tracks we'd already seen--Wyoming and Italy--and a brand-new track too: New Mexico. For the familiar tracks, visual improvements such as better particle effects were immediately obvious; the ATV bikes now kick up lots of dirt in the corners, and the developers have added a better sense of speed to effects such as trails coming off the ride when using the boost option.

　　Although you might expect a New Mexico track to be flat and featureless, the new track we saw in Pure is anything but. Built into the mountains, it's a challenging-looking series of fast straights and torturous switchbacks over arid, dusty tracks, with scrub grass everywhere and rocky outlets just looking to topple your rider from his or her perch with one wrong move. It's far from flat, too; in a game full of huge jumps, the New Mexico track features the most extreme cliff we've seen yet. This monstrous leap starts way up high, as you come off the edge of the cliff, leaping between the support cables of gondolas hundreds of feet in the air, and then eventually plummeting down to earth in the gorge below to continue your race. To give you a sense of the distance, the producer playing the game managed to turn four full flips on his ATV in midair before landing his bike on the ground.

　　One of the most compelling features in Pure will be the ability to construct ATV quad bikes from scratch, using the metric ton of parts you'll earn as you make your way through the game. Parts you'll be able to assemble include the frame, swingarm, A-arms, shocks, handlebars, among many others, and all of the parts will be actual licensed products from real parts manufacturers. They'll also have a real effect on how your ATV performs and, as you assemble different parts together, you'll get constant information on how a certain part will affect your bike's attributes such as maximum speed, acceleration, handling, boost, and tricks ability. If you're not interested in putting together your ATV piece by piece, you can choose to automatically assemble a bike that's built for either racing or stunts with the press of a button. You'll start out with two garage slots to save your assembled bikes, and you'll be able to earn up to 10 as you progress through the game.

　　Aggressive AI will mean you'll have to fight for every position.

　　The core of Pure's single-player experience will be the World Tour mode, which will be a series of tournaments across the seven locales found in the game. These tournaments will consist of between five and seven events. There are three event types: traditional races, sprints, and freestyle events. Race events are your typical multilap events, whereas sprint races put the emphasis on raw speed, with shorter tracks that feature fewer jumps and fewer opportunities to get away from your opponents. As a result, expect there to always be a lot of traffic, especially in the corners. Disney wasn't prepared to talk about how the freestyle events will work but, considering the game's emphasis on tricks, we expect the developers to have some tricks up their sleeves for these events.

　　There's still work to be done on Pure, including an entirely new HUD, the addition of all eight signature tricks for each of the prebuilt riders found in the game, as well as various spit-and-polish work leading up to its release later this year. We're curious to see how the 16-player online mode will work, especially with regard to frame rate, which seems pretty solid in the single-player experience. Expect to see much more on Pure in the coming weeks.