Reviews// Ferrari Challenge: Trofeo Pirelli

As with any driving game, after a while you get accustomed to the handling, and that's when the game starts to become a pleasure to play. Judicious use of the handbrake can blip the car into over-steer, and by using the throttle carefully, you can drift it around corners touge style. This is not the aim of the game, and you won't catch many real-life Ferrari Challenge racers driving that way. But it enables you to carry speed through the bends, which you can use to catapult you into overtaking along the straights.

Ferrari Challenge (the game not the real-life event) looks OK. But again its mediocrity shines through, it's not bad enough to criticise unduly, but it isn't as beautiful as GRID (reviewed here), or Burnout Paradise (reviewed here). The lighting is somewhat flat, and I haven't seen any particularly impressive weather or environmental effects yet.

Sure the rain is passable, and it does have a noticeable affect on the handling of the car. But it looks fairly dreary, the chance to really pick up rival cars' lights on the glistening track is largely missed. However, the in-car view showing rain on the windscreen is quite impressive, at least until your windscreen wipers clear it away. There's some dirt splash from the "kitty litter" up onto your bumpers, which is quite nice.

The tracks are drawn from the entire roster from the Ferrari Challenge calendar... nearly... they do not include the Nürburgring, which Mark Cale has said will be available as downloadable content. The ones we do have are well rendered.

The user interface is fine, if a little uninspired. But the car animations that are shown during the game intro are far less impressive than you'd expect; the cars look a little plasticky, and the polygons are clearly visible in what could so easily have been pre-rendered animation that would make you drool over a selection of Ferraris' beautiful lines.

Ferrari Challenge has little to set it apart from other games, but one way it endeavours to do so is by that most lazy of sub-games, Top Trumps. You know the rules, you select an aspect of a car (speed, horse-power, value, age, weight) from a selection on you card, then the other player reveals their equivalent value, and if yours is better, you win. There are two problems with this though, the first is that the categories are somewhat confusing. Older cars always beat younger ones even if they are less valuable.

This is the logic of the enthusiast, but I doubt the average person, given the choice between a modern Ferrari or the apple of some collector's eye would choose the latter. Also I am expected to believe that lower weight is always better than greater, without power being taken into account. This is simply not true, power-to-weight ratio is a far better indication of a car's likely performance.