The cars on offer, of which there are many, all have different handling characteristics that are derived from their horsepower, weight and and top speed. Some tracks have sections of tarmac where you will sense the firm grip. Once off into the dirt thogh you will be slip slidin' away happily, catapulting the rear of your car round the corners in order the get that perfect slide. Racing on ice is a high point in the game because of the playful nature of the physics as well as the beauty of the light reflecting off the ground. You can view all this from a few camera positions that are variations between above the car or from the bumper. Unfortunately there is no true in car view.

A full view positioned close to the ground, like having your head severed and strapped into a Mad Max sequence, is an option and quite exhilarating as well as playable. Even if you haven't raced the track before you will have a good chance at coming first thanks to your co-driver. He maintains a calm understated tone no matter how stupid you are and lets you know accurately what to expect on the tracks. So when he says "caution, exposure" what he really means is "watch this corner, there's a big cliff there if you pooch screw it."

If you do veer too far off course the game magically fades quickly to black and resets you back on the track. Every so often it seems a little sensitive about deviations from the chosen path but for the most part it's fine. It does come across as a better system than having an arbitrary chain link fence that can withstand any force. It does however mean you don't get to see many death defying crashes which is a shame. Maybe we can hope for a gratuitous death plugin. The later courses have narrower margins for error in the tracks and you'll find annoyingly hidden rocks behind bushes that spin you out of control. The car can often react a little too violently and a couple of times a small pebble would cause the car to flip over. At the end of the race you can watch a replay of all the action and the computer does a nice job of choosing different camera angles to make it worth watching, if only to relive that perfect run.

The action sounds authentic enough with the engine making suitable growling noises. You'll hear the cheers of the crowd (including the mooing cows) fade in and out as you fly past. Crashes have the requisite glass shattering and clanging but nothing over the top. The soundtrack is a standard collection of techno that I guess someone might enjoy. On the it was possible to import your own soundtrack from the hard drives mp3 collection. No simple option like that exists here but if you search around in your installation directory you'll find that the songs have rather graciously been stored as .wav files. If you export your favourite songs to the same format and rename them to match the songs in this folder you can swap them over you have your very own custom soundtrack. So you can put on some nice soothing for a spirited drive in the country, never let it be said we don't get to the heart of a game here at ferrago.

Whatever minor deficiencies this game possesses it makes up for with the huge variety of tracks and cars available. The graphical quality that we've all marvelled at on the XBox is brought to the in glorious high resolution. Once you organise your own soundtrack out you can happily relax into the game and enjoy it for what it is, an arcade game with the emphasis on just being damn good fun.

90%

By Richard Clifford