Like a precis of what will follow, the player's first sight of the game is a menu system which shows potential but is confused and unintuitive, not making it obvious in the least what's coming next, or what you might have just unlocked. It's not unusable, but could have been structured far more sensibly than it has been. What's available through the menus, though, is worth looking for. In particular, the inclusion of both fixed and dynamic difficulty settings increases the longevity of the game (which, with its career and championship modes, is already substantial), and makes a big difference to the way the game is played.

Your initial selection of cars is horribly sluggish, and while the interpretation of the speeds which can be realistically attained in an E200 is to be applauded, it hardly makes for a scintillating game. Give the game a while, however, and it starts throwing the concept and muscled up motors your way. Everything suddenly clicks into place, with genuinely fast and genuinely exciting racing to be had. The slider in the options screen which allows you to set your handling preference comes into its own at this stage also. All points between purely realistic "simulation" handling and purely arcade style are available and it's a nice addition to the game which makes a genuine difference to the way the cars handle - or, at least, to the way they skid. Its inclusion will hardly satisfy fans of Outrun as well as fans of F355 Challenge, but it's good to see an effort being made to cater for different sections of the genre.

On the face of things, the main game is at least graphically impressive, if somewhat bland in places. Some of the textures used are dazzlingly crisp, particularly for landscape and scenery, but the actual drawing of the cars and roadside features are much less consistent. The cars in particular seem oddly flat and two-dimensional, although it's difficult to put your finger on what's actually wrong with them. Minor frame rate glitches are irritating but initially forgivable given the amount of objects the game is throwing around - people on the streets, other cars, UFOs (which actually fit with the feel of the game better than you would perhaps imagine) and helicopters flying around. There's never a dull moment around these courses, which is useful - it helps to offset the absolute dearth of design flair which blights many of the torturously long, mostly straight and ultimately tedious circuits.

There are good tracks here, but little thought seems to have gone into the design overall, resulting in a truly mixed bag - and while some of them are a joy to race on, others among them feel like they're taking weeks and months out of your life. There's also a lot of potential for off-road exploration - the worlds are designed for a long way around most of the courses, although there are no real benefits to be had from such rambling, other than to satisfy the player's curiosity.

Sadly, once you start playing seriously it becomes apparent that the game engine hasn't been entirely finished, and you start to question the frame rate glitches after all. Why waste processor time drawing roadside features - trees, people, bins - which you can just drive straight through? Why do some roadside hazards slip wraith-like through your car, but others bring you to a gigantic, shuddering stop? Wouldn't it have made more sense to just leave the streets deserted, and concentrate on getting those beautiful background textures (and some of them are genuinely staggering to look at) moving at a more stable frame rate?

Aside from the regular racing (which occasionally includes some most entertaining off-road courses, complete with suspension-rocking, motion-sickness-inducing wobbles and lurches), there are also occasional off-road waypoint based courses to play through, with stringent time limits for getting from flag to flag. These are entertaining, but again flawed - failing to reach the goal within the given timeframe results only in fewer points being added to your somewhat confusing driver ranking; the game continues to the next stage as normal, even after such a failure.

The Music Manager is as comprehensive as you would expect of this generation of Xbox software, and ensures that your racing will always be to a soundtrack which pleases you. Your songs don't stop when a race does, and although it's not really any better than having a CD on in the background, it's still preferable to the stop-start style of, for example, Project Gotham. The engine sounds are pleasing enough, and the ambient sounds (and, given the amount going on around the courses, there are a lot of them) are very well done.

Even with the myriad flaws and irritations in this game taken into account, it's still an oddly compelling experience, one which handles well enough to make the gamer want to play (at least, once some of the more interesting tracks are unlocked), and want to unlock faster and better cars. The prospect of more interesting tracks is also an addictive one, and it's likely that anyone playing this game will give it a good deal more of their time than it probably deserves, perhaps out of a genuine desire to see the game improve, more likely out of sheer morbid fascination to see where else the developers could have improved their engine.

It's a decent enough idea for a racer and a nice driving model which is sullied by lacklustre execution; playing Mercedes Benz World Racing is a sometimes tragic experience. All through the game you get ideas of exactly what the developers wanted to do, and you know that if they'd pulled them off, they would have been brilliant. Sadly, for the majority of the game they just haven't managed to, and the maddening frustration created by playing what could best be described as a half-finished game with huge potential will lead to a brief dalliance following which most gamers will seek their driving entertainment elsewhere.