Well-known is the structure of the game. You get a fast car under your butt and get to do races all over the world, with a lot more variation than you would expect. In Japan you get fat vehicles that are ideal to do drift races and get smoking tires, in Europe you mostly get dream cars on official racing tracks and in the US the muscle cars are prset. Variation also appears in the challenges. Although it's always the idea to get a bronze, silver or gold medal the way to that is constantly different: normal races, drifting, fast rounds, survival, to even races that test how good you can steer and break. Extra fun is also that you'll constantly unlock now stuff like new vehicles, tracks (Francorshamp!), challenges, upgrades and designs.

Surprisingly good are the controls. The game at times is quite challenging and you'll really need to brake and try to go through corners correctly. Of course the game stays miles away from the GT5s and Forzas of this world, but it's hardly a Mario Kart. And thank God for that! The gameplay is tight and also the opponent A.I. will offer quite some opposition after the first, relatively easy, gold medals. Crashing is pushing other cars off the road is quite dangerous as there's even a damage model present. A hard touch with the wall can result in steering problems, broken axis or engine problems that can only be solved in the pit.

An unexpected extra is the track editor, for which you'll unlock constantly more pieces and surroundings. The editor is even added as some sort of race in the career mode ("Make a track of 3000 meter long with two chicanes") and is quite easy to use thanks to the stylus and with some patience. Also here there's quite a lot of depth and things can be changed like height, time of day to even the advertising on the side of the road. If you've made a great track you can easily share it with friends or test it in one of the many multiplayer modes.

We also remain positive when we check the whole thing from a technical side. The controls are very good so that you notice a difference between the different cars, and the graphics are very good for the DS. The drawing distance is decent so that (unlike in many other handheld racers) you don't suddenly get confronted with a wall, corner or another obstacle that you couldn't spot early enough on your screen. Both the tracks and cars are official and they're perfectly recognisable.