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Racing Evoluzione Review - Xbox

With racing games, there's not much new to be done. Quite often titles will come along proclaiming to be the next big thing with some "innovative" feature that usually ends up to be pointless and seem to exist only for the purpose of hype (Hello Total Immersion Racing!). It would be unfair to lump Racing Evoulzione into this group, since the game play is excellent. However it's big selling point - building your car's brand name - is unfortunately nothing more than a new way of unlocking vehicles.

Gameplay

The idea behind the games' "Dream" (i.e. career) mode is that you start off with your own company and build up a car brand to compete with the major manufacturers. You start off in a dingy garage with a small number of staff. Once you have completed a certain number of races your car is entered into semi-professional races, and you can start your research and development of a new vehicle.

There are three types of cars available to R&D, each suited to different track types (such as city circuits or mountain tracks). Each race has a certain number of "sales" attached to each position - win a race and you receive 16 sales. The more sales you have, the better the car you can develop. It is a pretty basic system - the only thing you have to do is win races and select a car type when you have finished researching it.

There is little scope for customisation besides body colour, gear ratio and down force, and you are limited to car designs submitted by Italian design schools students (alas the Homer is not one of them). While designing your own car would be a logistical nightmare for any developer, more choices in terms of design would greatly improve the depth of the Dream mode.

Your choices aren't as limited as they sound though, thanks to the games' 80-car list (around 40 real life and 40 concept cars). The handling is a little floaty, and lies somewhere between Ridge Racer and Project Gotham Racing. Handbrakes are mandatory and are often the only way to keep ahead of your opponents who are quite happy to force you into a barrier to keep their position.

The best thing to do is keep out of their way, since the vast majority of collisions involved the players car losing significant speed while the AI car speeds away. Sadly this sort of artificial difficulty level often results in frustration as you can lose a significant lead in a short time due to overly aggressive competitors. But don't stress too much, as the game features some pretty obvious rubber band AI, so within no time you will be back with the pack challenging for the lead. It's not a fatal flaw, and the overall racing experience is rewarding if slightly annoying at times.

Graphics

While the Dream mode lacks substance and the ... (continued next page)