Group S Challenge Critic Reviews

Excellent car models, lighting, and reflection effects help the smooth visuals create a sense of blazing speed, and the beautifully detailed tracks are punctuated by vicious turns and loops that require you to master braking and powersliding without losing too much velocity.

Although the drift is especially forgiving, as is the collision penalty, the lateral sway on the vehicles is some of the best ever put in a game.

Offers gamers a solid racing experience that might leave some gamers wanting more.

The control is a little eccentric. The controls can be reconfigured in a limited way, but the steering always seemed to tend toward over steering.

Another average racer. It has nothing major to offer to the racing world except pretty graphics, bad music, boring tracks, and lack of multiplayer options.

You have to keep buying new cars to progress. Because you are discouraged from altering your autos, you just forget about them, which severs any possible emotional connection this game attempts to develop.

A decent but plain racing game that doesn't really excel in any one category.

It has most of the gameplay options and technical competence you'd expect from an A-list publisher, but it never once engages you on an emotional level.

Unfortunately, the game suffers from so much slowdown when multiple cars are onscreen that it curtails any fun you might be having.

The frame rate issues are annoying as is the menu system. The handling, which doesn’t feel right initially, isn’t so bad once you get the hang of it. However, the driving genre is a particularly tough market, especially when the game at the top of league is so good.

Even when driven in full race trim, every vehicle feels ponderous and with overly soft suspension often resulting in an unnecessarily laborious control method. It's not a bad game, by any means, but the enjoyment provided is limited.

The graphics seal the deal. This just doesn't look like an Xbox game. The slowdown notwithstanding, the lighting is bad, the car models look wrong, and the trackside objects are sparse and ugly.

The ridiculous handling makes these additional modes practically impossible to play.

The worst issue, however, is the handling - akin to pushing a shopping trolley with one wheel locked, the cars in Group S are just about as twitchy as they can be.

The list of omissions is epic: decent A.I., car damage, real-life car parts, an in-dash view, analog gas and break buttons - and, well, you get the point.

There are glimpses of fun within each race. But the lack of race types, tracks, shoddy AI, and frame rate issues slow the fun down to a putter.

Anytime there are more than a couple cars onscreen, the game chugs and stutters like crazy. That's unforgivable on hardware this powerful.