World Racing 2

How successful is this sequel to one of the most underrated PC racers?

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I wracked up silly hours with the Xbox and PC versions of World Racing. The Synetic racer is a gem of a game, a game that all too few people have played. Sure, the PlayStation 2 and GameCube versions were rubbish, but on Xbox and PC it was a thrilling game.

What made it so great? For me the main attraction was the road system. There were some six areas in the game criss-crossed with roads and interesting features. And when playing in freeride mode instead of on set race courses, you could explore and find fascinating details such as the ski-jump in the Alpine section.

The other appealing aspect of the game was the physics engine, which could be scaled from an arcade pleasing level to something for physics students. It meant you could play the game any way you liked. So a sequel that plays to these strengths is bound to be great, isn't it?

It doesn't quite work out this way, and although better than the Xbox version, I felt a definite sense of disappointment with this sequel. Take the freeride mode for example. In the original game you could mess around with this right away, learning to control the cars and exploring the huge maps. Not so this time, instead you have to earn some credits before you can head off into the hills to enjoy yourself.

See the real problem with World Racing 2 isn't about any of the technical aspects of the game, the real problem is that it feels limiting and claustrophobic compared to the original game, in fact you'd be forgiven for thinking that World Racing was the sequel to this game.

At least there's plenty of content, with more than 120 mission races in career mode and over 90 cars from 17 manufacturers. It's an odd eclectic bunch of cars too. You're not going to be driving Ferraris in this game, but then at least it's not limited to vehicles from Mercedes-Benz as in the first game.

I remember many people who played the first game being bewildered by the game's ugly and confusing menu system. This time around Synetic has put the effort in and come up with a different ugly and confusing menu system for the sequel. This clunky system is used to navigate the career mode. This mode came as something of a shock to me due to the first license tests that open it up, specifically the third test. It took me ages to complete the simple time trial despite playing the first game to death. The difficulty curve seems screwed in the game, with some tasks just being the wrong side of being too tough, even for veterans of the first game. And there are fewer options for fine-tuning your experience and difficulty this time around, which doesn't help.

But despite the mess of the game's structure, it's quite a lot of fun once you get out onto the open road. The physics, based we're told on 200 paramenters, feel pretty damn good. Getting various controllers to work can be fiddly, but once set up the actual feel of the cars on the road is good.