XG3 belongs to that genre of super fast sci-fi racers that places you in an ultra-stylistic racing vehicle, arms you to the teeth, and sends you blazing across a gravity-defying racetrack surrounded by a futuristic landscape. The game is set up in the usual modes: Career, Time Trial, and Multiplayer. Career encompasses four leagues consisting of ten tracks and escalating racing divisions. This is where you can unlock new tracks and earn money in order to buy faster engines and more weapons. The multiplayer is distinctive in the fact that it not only offers 4-player races, but 2-player cooperative play in Career Mode as well.

But this game is really about the speed. The cycles burn up the tracks at 250, 500, 750, and 1000 G’s. They break the sound barrier. Everything about the presentation of this game screams. The graphics move at a solid 60fps throughout most of the game. Weather effects during storms add to the experience, as rain falls convincingly toward the moving camera and spatters on the lens. One particularly impressive special effect happens as you cross the sound barrier. The world blurs into a vortex of speed and the music and sound effects descend into a low hum. This effect has the strange distinction of being both the most intense moment in the game and the most serene.

Some of the tracks in XG3 are wonderful, taking racers on a roller coaster ride of twists and turns, climbing steep inclines, and cascading down insane drop-offs. Some settings are beautiful. Siris Canyon traverses a great valley and takes you down into a gorgeous canyon. Oceania dives deep beneath the ocean surface as you race through an underwater city. The best courses are the ones that, like these, offer something vivid and unique, or take place on a broad, sweeping vista where the speed of your vehicle and the craziness of the tracks are balanced by the vast landscape. However, most of the tracks are not so inspired, offering mostly confined roadways, tunnels, and bland Blade Runner rip-offs.

This sets off a string of mixed and mediocre qualities that drag XG3 down. The graphics are good. There are lots of little details like the streaking exhaust flames of motorcycles, some real time lighting effects, and such. But other than the frame rate, some special effects, and a few terrific backgrounds, nothing will knock you over. Truth is, most of the levels fly by so quickly that any real texture and detail would be lost anyway. Aside from the perfectly understated moments when you break the sound barrier, the music and sound effects are wholly unremarkable. The game does support Dolby Pro Logic II surround sound, but the sound effects really don’t give it that much to do.

While playing at such high speeds, an intuitive interface is a must. In terms of control, XG3 fits the bill. The directional stick moves you to the right and left. Pushing back will help your momentum up steep hills and forward increases your speed on the way down. The A button is your throttle, B your boost, X your rear view. Y fires your weapons, Z and the control pad cycle through them. The left and right triggers control your air brakes, which help with sharp turns. The C stick controls the camera. The HUD, however, does not perform so well. There are only a few meters and counters to keep track of, but they are presented as odd swooshes that have no incremental measurements, or any other easily discernable way of telling just how much ammo, energy, or whatever you have left. Rather than looking at a meter and knowing immediately that you have 6 missiles left, you are pretty much limited to having a lot, a little bit, or none.

This shortcoming leads to a tricky bit of game play mechanics that tethers your shield and turbo energy to one another and pools the ammo for all of your different weapons together. This means that whenever you use your turbo, you drain the same energy meter as your shields. Likewise, when you fire any weapon, you drain a collective ammo meter for all of your weapons. It seems silly to me that boosting your speed in order to get out of the range of your opponent’s weapons is potentially as compromising to your shields as actually getting hit by them. I understand that it adds a certain amount of strategy to using turbo boosts, and makes for a slightly original style of game play, but it really is more annoying than anything else.

And as strange as it may sound after I have hyped the great sense of speed, XG3 lacks the sort of nerve-wracking intensity that a game like this needs. The tracks are buffered by guardrails and tunnels, so there is no real danger of flying off the track if you miss a turn. The weapons are not devastating enough, nor the crashes spectacular enough, to inspire fear. To be honest, I never felt there was anything at stake while playing this game. Yeah, the game is fast, but most of my attention was spent trying to stay in the middle of the road and conserve energy. I should have been more worried about what was going to happen to me if I lost control of my motorcycle, or my opponent’s missile made a direct hit. I should have been on the edge of my seat because one wrong move could cause everything I have worked so hard for to disappear in an instant. But I wasn’t.

In the end, outside of being really, really fast, XG3 has nothing interesting or original to offer. Despite the fact that this game features supersonic motorcycles as the vehicle of choice, the physics and operation of the cycles is no different than the hovercraft or rocket ships of others in the genre. The weapons are pretty much the same machine guns, missiles, mortar shells, and rail guns you have seen a million times. Were it not for the processing power of next-gen systems like the PS2 and Gamecube, there would be no difference between this and all of the other shallow, soulless F-Wipeout-Extreme-Fusion-Zero-G games out there. Add that to the fact that this game is very short, and I cannot recommend this game for anything other than a rental, even for fans of the genre.