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This really is great fun. Very, very tense at times and requiring extreme concentration.

Each vehicle really is different. Took me ages to learn how to drive the bikes, the first time I encountered them.

It’s great fun and when I woke this morning I ran downstairs so I could play it again (well, ish), but whoever decided those radial mines were a good idea needs shooting. They’re too fast to be a reasonable reaction test to Mister In My Thirties here, so they just kill you dead and turn bits of the game into memory tests – normally bits five or ten minutes after the last checkpoint.

If the running and killing wasn’t so much fun I’d have turned it off in a grump.

First impressions of this game were not good at all. It gave me a race and a choice of different types of vehicle, so I chose the buggy and got started. It felt slow and unfair and I came last. After switching to the bumper-cam the speed felt better and the fun started to seep in. Still, I wasn’t winning. So I tried a rally car. This time I managed not only to do better, but to push the car so hard that my engine blew up and I exploded over the finish line in first place. Rarely do games say “hey, you’re getting it!” quite so clearly. That was the first click.

On to the next race, no choice of vehicle, had to drive a racing truck. I couldn’t win. Try after try after try and I kept coming last, or thereabouts. I even in my desperation tried the motion-sensitive control method… for one lap. It’s like Excite Truck, but not quite right. Might be reasonable with some adjustment, maybe, but the stick’s fine, I think.

Anyway, the second click happened when I tried a different route round the track. Suddenly my last place became fourth. Then first. That’s when I realised that when the game tells you that you have to choose the best route round a course for your vehicle it really, really means it. If you try and take a buggy through the deep mud the big rigs churn up for breakfast you’re just not going to make it. Your stick and trigger skills won’t matter, you need to go a different way.

So once that second click happened I started winning races fairly easy. It’s really good fun, but – boy! – does it try to hide it at first.

A couple of other things to note. It looks phenomenal and anyone wanting to show off the graphical power of the Playstation really should check it out. On the downside the load times are appalling. Race restarts are instant, thankfully, but the screen where you choose what vehicle to drive takes so long to load that I think it can fairly be described as broken.

With the driving aids on and damage off it’s very dull indeed.

With the driving aids off and damage on it’s much more dynamic, but my wheels keep falling off.

I don’t think I’ll be buying the full game, though for patient, careful F1 fans it seems like it could be decent.