Your heart is pounding, your palms are sweating and hundreds of horse power is poised and ready at the command of your right foot! At the signal you hammer the gas and race off into the night. Speed is the objective, time is your enemy.

Street racing is sweeping the country and now you can experience the fun from your X Box® console. Kemco’s Top Gear® RPM Tuning features all of the excitement you would expect from a street race experience. Select a vehicle and then start the customization process from the spoilers and hood to the very intricate details of the colour and decals. The amount of customization will blow you away. Next, take your car to the streets and see how it compares to the competition. Multiple game modes and an open environment provide for an experience you would expect from the Top Gear® franchise.

Right then from the product description we can work out that this is a driving game, there are a lot of driving games out there at the moment (well there always has been) and some are VERY good and others not so good. Top Gear RPM Tuning tries to cash in on the current interest in street racing as this game really should come with a complimentary copy of Max Power and The Fast And The Furious on DVD, as this game is apparently about customizing your wheels and racing them with other like minded racers. So what we have here is a street racer with the added bonus of blinging up your ride.

Gameplay:

Well as this is a budget release and there are NO officially licensed cars, you can pretty much work out what they are but they aren’t called what you think! The modes in Top Gear are very very straightforward.

There’s a Quick Race mode that allows solo or split-screen head-to-head racing, plus a single player competition which plonks you in the driving seat into highly modified Chav mobile. The Quick Race takes place on various courses within fictitious cities, with lap and point-to-point options at your fingertips.

The second mode is Story mode, this is where the game tries to add something a bit different to the mix. The story mode really is a very poor rip off mimicking The Fast And The Furious. In this game you play as the character of Vince, I will summarise Very briefly here as it is one boring adventure. It is the backdrop to some racing, some talking to a Kris Kristofferson type character and something called the RedSet that the game forgets to explain until the end. The worst part (trust me there are many bad parts) about the adventure mode is the mission structure and the truly dire placement of save points. Frequently, you'll find yourself taking part in three-race championships, where you have to earn a certain number of points to win. In each of these, there's always some pointless little race you'll have to do either before or after the championship; so there are actually four races, per race. These segments can take upwards of a half hour each, after a while you'll probably just want to give up.

The third mode is Tune and Race; this skips the Story mode’s excess, but still retains the monetary system for buying and modding cars. Basic categories are nitrous, exterior mods, or mechanical mods (not sure why they were broken up like this) , with the option to tune the mechanical mods for even better performance. All major areas of a car’s performance can be modified in the mechanical section, such as injection, ignition, exhaust, engine internals, cooling, electronic components, and forced induction. Chassis changes include suspension components, brakes upgrades, lightening programs, and transmission parts.

Each category has the familiar “stages” of performance, with higher stages costing more and needing unlocking through logging time in the game. Some of the better mods are all-wheel-drive systems, brake proportioning valves, and stroker bottom ends (don’t you just love to stroke a bottom?); these items are unique and rarely seen in tuning games at any level and tend to be known only to the anorak wearing among us. The body mods in Top Gear RPM Tuning are also unique, since some of them not only make your car look ludicrous and garish but are also carbon fibre and have a down force effect associated with them (apparently).

The controls in the game are actually one of the few things that there are no complaints about. They are easy enough to learn and the cars respond reasonably well.

Graphics:

Unless you are blind then the graphics are not going to blow you out of your gaming seat. This is not a flash looking game at all or a stylish one. The cars have an over polished look to them and look like they were designed for a PSOne. The city you “free roam” in looks half finished, low res and woefully under populated with hardly anything in it at all. Even the attempts to add a wafer thin veneer of style with motion blur looks so cheaply done and really does not add anything to the visuals. There is only one camera angle in the game as well, but even then there are problems with the general frame rate.

Sound:

There is only one way too sum up the sound in the game, truly awful. The engine and exhaust sounds appeared to have been taken for a Fisher Price toy car, they are some of the worst sound effects I have heard in any game. Surely it must be easier to get a sample of a Reliant Robin than go through the effort of finding the most unrealistic sounds they can.

The music in game is not as bad as the sound effects you will be pleased to hear as there are a mixture of Rock tracks and dance music on offer; an obvious attempt to widen the appeal of the game, again this falls flat on its face as it sounds so synthesized.

There is one redeeming thing to come though; the voice acting is in comparison, Oscar worthy! But average in any other release, it wont take you long to mute the sound on this game though, even if it is to eek the game out for an extra 5 minutes.

Longevity:

Not long! The story, the racing or anything else about this game will not keep you interested for long, the only reason that you would want to carry on playing it is to see if the game actually improves. There is nothing in this game that will make you want to spend any time on it once you have played it once.

Overall:

Poor too say the least, the Xbox is not bereft of good racing games, and this one is just plain bad. It has the feel of a game rushed into production and has little polish added to it. It basically smacks of a policy of cashing in on the latest car craze. The sound and graphics are dire for a release on any platform this far into its development. There really is nothing I can recommend about this game.

Pros:

• You don’t have to buy it
  
• Easy to master controls
  
• You can use the packaging to replace the damaged one in your DVD collection
  

  Cons:
  

  • The worst sound effects this side of a ZX Spectrum
    
  • No XBOX Live
    
  • Dire graphics