Kraze

I'm no racing driver, however many laps of the local Sainsbury's car park I might have done as a lad, but I suspect that winning a race at the highest level takes more than simply shoving your car into top gear and holding out at the front.

If Lewis Hamilton's success is anything to go by, then you actually hang back, waiting until the last possible moment to score the championship by snatching fifth place on the last corner. That's how it's done.

Anyone who samples Kraze, however, might get the wrong impression about motorsport. Races here really are a case of slipping into fifth gear as early as possible, knocking your way to the front of the pack and crashing into corner after corner, hoping you build up enough speed in the straights to hold off your competitors.

Which, of course, you will, given that Kraze's racers have the skill and guile of a Sunday driver on beta blockers. This is a racer for people who don't actually want to race.

Every element of Kraze is jagged and unkempt, playing more like an attempt at a 3D prototype than any kind of racing simulator.

The races themselves (and, in truth, calling them 'races' is rather generous), aside from the rally contests, drop you in a contest of three cars and three laps, all as dull as ditchwater.

Your control is limited to steering (either with '4' and 6' or the D-pad) and shifting through the five gears with the '5' key. In truth, skirting up to fifth gear is your only way of keeping pace.

Controlling the gears is also the sole way of increasing and decreasing your speed, though dropping back down with the '8' key is often more hassle than it's worth. Simply riding the corners, bumping from side to side, offers a greater chance of victory than fiddling between gears.

That might not seem an especially realistic way to drive, but then Kraze isn't a very realistic racer.

For starters, graphically it is a major step back when compared to some of the recent competition, the cars themselves being little more than smudged rectangles on wheels.

Furthermore, Kraze's Career mode - which was presumably meant to be the meat of the game when compared to Quick Play - isn't a career at all, but rather a simple way of playing all the tracks in the four kinds of races on offer.

Covering what is described as F1, Street Races, Rally and Mud contests, two different courses make up each discipline, but none is stringed together with another to form any kind of long-term challenge.

Entering into a 'career' is in fact nothing more than a menu option - a seemingly unfinished feature that adds to the feeling that Kraze is playing at being a racer, rather than being a racer you might want to play.

On a similar note are the invisible walls that line almost every track, making it impossible to take any kind of off-road route whether by accident, or as an attempt at a short-cut.

It's nothing more than an annoyance until you attempt a street race, where the other roads that seem available to you are actually walled off. It leads to a lot of lost time on your first couple of laps and is just another nail in Kraze's rather rusty coffin.

The prospect of online multiplayer could and should lift Kraze up above the masses, but sadly during our run-through it didn't appear to be functioning.

Even so, it's hard to imagine that the tracks will be somehow lifted by having two other human controlled wall-huggers involved. Kraze simply doesn't work at the most basic level.

It's not that it's broken in any way, but the unfinished feeling that taints play is no more excusable. Even though the technology should allow for great strides forward, you'll have more joy sampling even the most elementary 2D racing simulators from years ago.

The better examples have a substance and a sense of style sadly absent from Kraze, which does a better job being a racing simulator-simulator than it does of emulating any kind of real life motorsport.