Furious Karting, as the name implies, is all about kart racing, but not the cool Indycar style cart racing. No, what we have here is genuine go-kart racing, with little lawnmower engines powering wide-bodied one-man vehicles. Yes, these are the go-karts of your youth, only souped up every now and again by powerups like rockets and nitro tanks.

Apparently, in the universe this game seems to inhabit, there's a whole teenage subculture that lives hard and fast racing go-karts. I'm not kidding you, that's the basic premise of this game. When you play in the single player story mode, you'll sign up with a team, which you'll race against until you get far enough into the story to race other teams.

The actual racing in Furious Karting is pretty generic, with gas and brake being all you need to worry about. Sure, there are some tricks you can pull when you hit jumps, but they are mostly variations on front and back-flips and only serve to pump up your "fun" score, which, when filled, allows you to pull more of the same tricks, just with more stability.

As you race around the track, you'll grab power ups, mostly in the form of nitro tanks which of course boost your speed for short amounts of time. To make the racing more "furious," you can pull out a baseball bat and deliver a solid smack to anyone within range. This doesn't take them completely out of the running; it just flips their kart and slows them down a bit. Slugging players decreases your "karma" rating, which decreases your chances of them being kind to you when you're within the range of their Louisville Sluggers. Irritate another player enough, and he'll challenge you to a one-on-one race, which well, you can easily win by smacking the tar out of your challenger every chance you get.

Lastly, there's the "speed" rating, which limits how fast you can go. There's nothing much I can say about this rating, beyond the fact that some racers start with such insane speed ratings, you'll never defeat them unless you beat them frequently with the ball bat.

Let me wrap up the gameplay by saying this, Furious Karting is quite possibly one of the easiest games you'll play this year. There's almost zero challenge to it unless you take one of the really slow drivers and see what you can do with him. The A.I. for the other drivers is so weak as to be pointless, and the tracks lack any real variety, they're just a bunch of turns with a few minor obstacles and a smattering of jumps lying about. Once you discover your line through a track, you will win, even if you started at the absolute rear of the pack. In all honesty, even Crash Team Racing for the PSOne had more variety in its tracks and opposition than Furious Karting, and that game is over three years old!

The word "functional" comes to mind when I think about the graphics in Furious Karting. While they aren't the worst I've seen this year, they aren't much better then some of the later PlayStation titles. Bright, cartoony colors tend to be the norm, yet indoors the colors become drab and dull. Character sprites are ok, but the cutscenes are just unacceptable, being that they're as polygonal as a PSOne title (thankfully, they're not as jaggy as one).

And finally there's the framerate issue, which doesn't make the game unplayable, but does get pretty annoying. With all the graphical firepower of the Xbox at their disposal, and the lackluster graphics they put into this game, you'd think Atari's developers could at least have taken the time to clean up the framerate. Alas, that's not the case, and the chop gets nasty when you're using the faster players and especially when you hit a nitro boost.

There are two built-in soundtracks, and the order you hear them in is determined by the team you choose at the start of your furiously extreme racing adventure. But don't worry; once you're played through your team's soundtrack, the other will kick in. Hopefully you've got plenty of custom Xbox soundtracks on your hard drive, because these two built-in soundtracks are cheesy attempts at rockin' hard rock, as imagined by the fifty-year old who's the same guy that imagined go-karting would be extreme.

The voice acting is a cheeseball attempt at creating an internationally diverse group of players, all voiced by American actors. As you can imagine by this description, the accents are over-the-top bad.

Lastly, there are the sound effects, which, like the graphics, are simply functional. Many of them sound like they were recorded in a padded room or some other noise-deadening environment.

When you make it through the storyline, and I'm sure you will, there's nothing that will bring you back to Furious Karting for another go. The multiplayer is just awful enough to ensure that your friends won't want to play it. Case in point, one of our testers stated, "Guys, this is just bad, I mean, really bad, can we play something else?" during our multiplayer trials. There's simply not enough variety in the racers, tracks or cars to give this game any replay value.

This game is, after a few hours, furiously dull. It's too easy, too limited and too poorly thought-out to maintain anyone's interest for long. Getting tired of being passed all the time? Start clubbing your opponents! Tired of getting clubbed all the time? Then race at full bore and find all the shortcuts and nobody will ever get near you. You might rent this if there's nothing else available at the shop, but I'd suggest your money be better spent on a rental or purchase of Crash Team Racing or Mario Kart.