Total Immersion Racing Xbox Review

This game has tried a new approach to your usual racing games. The AI opponents now have a kind of emotional response to how you drive. This is how I first got excited about the possibilities of this game. Now that Xbox Live! racing games such as MotoGP have human opponents, this game not being Live! enabled needed to have some pretty good AI to compete.

The emotion system reacts as such that if you keep cutting an opponent up, he will supposedly get more and more angry with you and retaliate. Sounds pretty cool does it not.

Unfortunately with what the game promises it isn’t the best experience ever and as for emotional responses they seem very tame and unimportant as you drive around the circuits.

Graphically the game has some really solid visuals. Not jaw dropping but not terrible either hence the only term I could use… Solid.

There is quite a bit of detail around the circuits which is a nice feature but the graphics seem really low resolution and jaggy all over. This makes it hard to see corners coming up especially if you are using a steering wheel and are using one of the internal views. The game lacks any real Xbox enhancements, except for the odd nice lighting effect, but nothing to smile at. The only thing that really sticks out is the smoothness.

The cars themselves are nice enough, but shortcuts like some cars having very flat looking rear lights which looks odd as you seem to focus on the lights more knowing how dull they look.

Controlling the car is ok but addiction to the game is almost non-existent. Cars are not terrible to control, but not realistic enough either and this seems to be the trend with the whole game. Not terrible but not great either!

You have your usual championship style system where you earn extra tracks and cars, but this soon also gets tedious very quickly and the actual racing is uninspiring.

When racing around the circuit you have your manager saying very helpful hints, such as overtake the car in front and you’ll be in first place! Well duh.. The rest of the time he is a quiet little mouse saying hardly anything.

To say this game promised so much, not much is delivered with any real impact to the game. The graphics are average, the gameplay is average and the control is average. The one saving grace of this game is the techno like music playing as you race around the courses.

This review seems very short, but the game hasn’t got that much interest to talk about. Better luck next time guys.

Conclusion

A pretty average affair all round here. The game racing seems very slow and cars don’t react quite right. There are much better offerings and the emotion idea seems to be only a gimmick.