Buggy Heat is a just-average racer that could have been a fun arcade smash-fest but ends up just being short and mostly dull.

Graphics: The environments are very detailed and some of the spatial and weather effects are incredible, most notably the Peru course. The sense of size and distance in the backgrounds is impressive. The cars are very detailed as well, complete with full-3d driver and suspension that moves, and tires that stop spinning when you lock them up. The shadows are very good, and the cars are fully light-sourced. They get progressively dirtier as the race moves on, unlike Sega Rally's one-step dirtying. When you jump up high you'll cast a shadow far in the distance. You kick up all sorts of debris, mud, water, etc. off the track. The sense of being tossed around in an off-road vehicle is very well done.

Buggy Heat has the best in-car view I've ever seen. I'd compare it to Rally Cross's inside view on the Playstation, except the camera gets knocked around and you can see the wheels and front suspension of your car get smashed around so it's even better. It's really pretty nauseating and I usually have to switch back to the outside view to keep racing, but it's incredibly impressive nonetheless. In the inside view the game looks incredibly real. The motion view is interesting but ultimately just ditracting - you get an inset screen of the driver turning the wheel and shifting in the front view mode camera.

The other cars look very solid as well. The only problem I have is that everything ends up looking slightly toy-ish somehow - like you're driving little remote-control cars around. But that's cool too so I can't complain that much.

Control: There's definitely a learning curve here, but I finished Normal and Hard mode in less than an hour so it's not that hard to get the hang of. In fact, in the end it's just too easy. The AI is pretty weak. Just don't be expecting the high-speed sliding turns of Sega Rally - you'll frequently grind to a halt in a turn or even in the rough edges of the track, and inexplicable spins still happen to me on occasion. You can tune the cars in many ways so you can set up your car to your driving style which helps.

Gameplay: There is a Time Trial mode, a Championship mode where different difficulty levels affect which races you get and the difficulty of the opponents. There's a Training mode where you can watch training videos (in japanese) or go on the practice course, which is almost as much fun as the main game game, at least for a while. it's a repeating world with jumps, ramps, water, mud, hills, sand, roads, electric poles, and all sorts of other hazards to play with.

(Try taking the "Tricky Dave" car, putting it in reverse, turning hard left, and accelerating as hard as you can in one of the open areas in the Practice area. Just hold it down for 20 seconds or so and you'll be doing backwards donuts at 80kph. Do this in the driver view and you'll get sick.)

Championship mode is you racing against the 7 other cars for points in a typical Chapionship mode, where supposedly you can be eliminated for not having enough points to continue. It's never happened to me though.

Track design is OK, with one exceptional track (the Peru one) and a bunch of average ones. There's a good mix of surfaces and hills, jumps, ridiculously banked turns, and the occasionaly weather effect like snow, or a sandstorm.

Replay: Pretty low. I'd wait to rent it unless you absolutely must have every racing game or you have a more-than-healthy obsession with off-roading. I'm already thinking about trading it in so I can get Soul Calibur cheaper.

Sound/Music: The music, as usual for racing games, blows. I only made it one championship season before turning it off. The sound effects are pretty good, with plenty of thumps, rumbles, and environmental sounds (especially that weird stormy sound on the Peru track). Since turning off the music turns off ALL of the music, it's eerily quiet in between races. The standard announcer is pretty American sounding - I switched to the alternate which is a Japanese girl with a heavy accent just because it's a little more entertaining.

Language Barrier: Nonexistant. The training videos are the only thing entirely in Japanese, but who needs those? Just go drive - you'll get the hang of it. Just go easy on the gas. Some of the menus are mostly Japanese, but most have English as well.

Replay: I'll be contacting an import shop soon for trade-in - I'm done.

Overall: This is a game that probably should have had more arcade-style controls. It's a weird mix of arcade presentation and track design with more realistic controls. I think it should have had a four-player mode as well - it could have been a great party game. As it is, it's just kind of blah. Uninspired and uninspiring. A little hard to get the hang of but once you do there's not much there. Beatiful graphics like most any DC game, but otherwise, wait for a rental. it has a very nice preview video of Aero Dancing in the options menu - anyone have a copy of that they want to unload? I'll trade you Buggy Heat... Seriously, I want Aero Dancing now. E-mail me (tom@callahan.org).

Graphics: 9
Control: 7
Gameplay: 6
Sound/Music: 7
Replay: 4

Language Barrier: Virtually None

- Tom Callahan