XGRA follows the same basic gameplay style of its predecessors in the Extreme G Racing series with the exception of one major new addition: sponsorship. There are now eight racing sponsors, each of which offers your racer a cache of varied weapons, bike designs, and handling styles. Gone are the old days of earning cash to upgrade your own bike as now big wins earn you big sponsorship upgrades. New sponsors equate to new bikes and equipment upgrades. As you win or place well, you'll earn points, which, much like in rally racing titles, are tallied up at the end of each circuit. If you've earned enough points, your bike will receive some sort of upgrade and you'll go on to the next circuit. The addition of sponsorship and the dropping of the need to manage your cash allow for more open and inviting gameplay, but unfortunately give you fewer customization options.

At the start of each race, your sponsor will issue you a contract, which basically functions as a preset list of victory conditions. The conditions of the contract can range from finishing ahead of a certain racer, to destroying rival billboards along the track, or even destroying another opponent outright. The contract system helps break up the monotony of racing by giving you something to shoot for, or sometimes to shoot at. Unfortunately, in order to achieve certain contracts you can be forced to lose the race because the rider you have to kill can't keep up with the rest of the pack. It often becomes an exercise in frustration as you're trying to race well, complete contracts, navigate obscene twists and turns and just survive the entire process while racing along at 800MPH. Memorizing the track will quickly become your first priority, especially if you hope to do well at XGRA.

Bikes can be tricked out with one of five primary weapons (cannons, bombs, energy weapons, rockets or electrical weapons) that can be upgraded twice by eliminating opposing racers during a race. Your rider also has access to several unique secondary weapons such as the Vampyre, an energy sucking beam weapon, or the Deathstrike, which calls down a super-heated ion blast from an orbiting space platform directly onto your target. While the developers added plenty of new weapons and upgrades, they've also removed a few, most notably the turbo tank. They've replaced the tank with F-Zero inspired "turbo grids" that are scattered along the track and temporarily speed up your bike when you pass over them.

XGRA's control scheme is pretty simple, consisting of gas, brake and weapon buttons. While the control scheme is simple enough, the sense of speed in the game may make it somewhat unapproachable to new players as controlling a bike that's screaming along at 800MPH can prove to be challenging to even experienced gamers. However, for those who crave speed and have fast reflexes, XGRA delivers.

While the AI in the game isn't too difficult to defeat, it does provide a decent challenge, especially as you progress through the game's four difficulty levels. The other racers don't seem to have any extraordinary advantage except that they know the track ahead of time while you've got to learn it from scratch. The opposition is smart enough to hold grudges, so if you fire on another bike during a race, you've just made an enemy who will hunt you down during future races. This built-in rivalry system adds a little more personality to the other racers, making them feel more like human players.

The graphics in XGRA are quite lush, not that you'll be noticing them much as you scream across the swooping vistas. The twisting track often splits apart, coils around itself, and takes you to some incredible places, making it oftentimes difficult to figure out what direction you're going in. To make things even more interesting, the track will sometimes go straight up a 90-degree cliff.

Visually, the tracks are all pretty unique. One has you racing through underwater tunnels and even into an underwater cavern that has had all the water pumped out. Yet another has you racing around an asteroid in deep space. When near the asteroid, the sound of your engine is audible but when the track loops off into space past the airlock, the sound of your engine is eerily absent. The tracks are huge and offer a good variety of ambience and detail. There are 14 tracks in total spread across 11 different locales to keep things interesting for the racers.

Unfortunately for all this graphical grandeur, the tracks have difficult to navigate areas that really detract from the overall racing experience. Even keeping a good racing line is quite difficult with the absurdity of some of the track designs. I found myself frequently bouncing between rails as I tried to navigate through twisting areas so much that at times I felt as if I was inside a pinball machine instead of a racetrack.

The bikes in XGRA are well-detailed and sport colored trails (similar to Wipeout and Tron), which help you spot a specific rider you may need to beat or take out. Weapons effects, especially the explosions from bombs, are vivid and often shake the screen. Other graphical effects are well done, particularly the speed boost, which distorts the screen to give you a sense of tunnel vision.

If there's one glaring weakness in the graphics, it's that the game moves so quickly, you'll rarely get to enjoy them. Pity the poor graphic designers for XGRA, since gamers will never see most of their work.

When it comes to XGRA's audio, it's all good, but there's nothing really outstanding. There are three soundtracks in the game: dance, rock and mix, and all are of a quality I would expect in a racing title. The sound effects themselves are believable; from the high-pitched scream of the cycles to the thunderous pounding of the weapons and explosions. What really bothered me though were the voices of the other racers and your sponsor. The constant one-liners they spout off get old quickly and will have your reaching for the volume control within a short time.

XGRA's replayability is hampered by the limited single player circuit mode, which offers very few reasons to return to it once completed. Multiplayer, which is always a good option for enhancing the replay value of any racer, is available on both the Xbox and the PS2 in four-player and two-player split screen respectively.

As a futuristic racing title, XGRA has come a long way from near-obscurity on the Nintendo 64 (as Extreme-G). This title is beautiful graphically but the outrageous learning curve will keep most gamers at arm's length. I can't help thinking I would have enjoyed this title so much more if it hadn't forced me to spend most of my time preventing myself from bouncing from rail to rail during the race. To be successful at XGRA, you need to memorize all the tracks, but the tracks frequently have so many splits that it's a fruitless endeavor to try doing so, especially when you're racing at such high speeds. In the end, XGRA will probably tide race fans over until Gran Tourismo 4 hits the streets, at which point XGRA will become nothing but a gaming memory.

See more screens on the XGRA media page