If you’ve been looking for a decent racing game on the Xbox Live Indie Games service to play with friends both locally and across Xbox Live, you could do a lot worse than Avatar Racedrome. It’s cheap, relatively fun and will keep you going for a good hour or two.

It’s a rather flawed experience, however, let down by bland tracks, a lack of customization and boring environments. The action is definitely there, but it just feels like there’s no heart to the game at all.

GAMEPLAY

Initial reactions aren’t great. Each of Avatar Racedrome’s 16 tracks are set in the very same stadium environment, with the same set of track pieces in different formations. It’s hard to tell the races apart, and it makes it incredible hard to care about actually driving around them.

This shallow aura seeps into all areas of the game. Car customization is minimal and pointless – you can change the colour of your kart and the flag adorning its bonnet, but thats about it. Every car looks identical in shape and size – I can’t even remember the last time I played a racing game which didn’t give me the option to change my car type.

It definitely feels like Avatar Racedrome is trying to emulate the popular Trackmania game series with its setting and barebone racing, but this direction does not do the game any favours.

Once you’ve gotten over the bland packaging, however, you’ll find a fairly decent racer underneath. Accelerating feels fast and cornering works well – there’s an option to turn on ‘auto braking’, allowing you to power around corners and let the game alter your skids accordingly. I was surprised at how good this proved to be, and my experience definitely improved as a result.

An interesting if rather strange feature is the rewind function. At any point during a single player race, you can hold down the left L button to rewind time. Everything begins moves in reverse very smoothly, and it’s pretty hypnotic viewing. Quite hilarious to play around with, but ultimately makes every single race a doddle, since you can simply redo every single corner you mess up.

There are several game modes on offer, including single player races, local multiplayer and multiplayer over Xbox Live. The single player tournament mode is quite the challenge, as the AI-controlled karts take no prisoners and race for their lives. It’s just about the right difficulty level, although you’ll probably only play through once or twice before you feel that you’ve seen everything.

The multiplayer can be played two-player split-screen, or up to 8 players via the internet. The local action isn’t so great – the two screens look squashed and don’t use up the whole widescreen display, and with only two cars on the track it feels quite barren – but if you can get a few friends to play over Xbox Live, you’re laughing. It’s all good fun, although during this mode karts cannot collide with each other due to server restraints.

STYLE

As mentioned before, Avatar Racedrome suffers from just not having much soul. Cars all look the same, levels all look and feel similar, there’s just the single environment to drive around, and only the avatars racing in the cars give the game any personality whatsoever.

The soundtrack is your average techno mix and not worth singing about. The car sounds, too, are pretty standard – revs of the engine, screeches of tyres – you’ve heard it all before.

All in all, it is Avatar Racedrome’s look and feel which really stop it from being something highly recommendable. If there were different worlds to race around, with opponents who were driving their own mode of transport, the gameplay would slot into place. Instead, we’re left with a title which feels too half-hearted.

STORY

You race to win! As with the majority of racing games, there is no storyline. You can stick your country’s flag on the front of your ride and pretend you’re powering down the track to honour your motherland, but really it’s all about the racing.

OTHER

It’s difficult to recommend Avatar Racedrome, given all its flaws. Yet compared to the majority of racers available for the Xbox Live Indie Games service, this is probably one of the best.

If you can see past the blandness of it all, there’s an above-average racing experience for playing with your friends. If you’re looking to eat away an hour or two with some pelts around the track, this may be your best option, especially given the $1 (80 Microsoft points) price tag.