Driving along and bashing people with baseball bats hasn't been done enough in games. Happily, Furious Karting rights this particular wrong. When you're close enough, a swing of the bat knocks your opponent from their kart and makes you feel good. Your prey even remembers you're a bit of a git and will try and get you back. It's vengeful, in a cheery cartoon fashion.

There are other good ideas in the Furious Karting garage. The right stick pulls stunts, and pulling off a mid-air barrel roll is a good feeling. You can also shift your driver's weight and get your kart moving on two wheels, in classic stuntman fashion. If all this pleasantness indicates that Furious Karting is a cheery little number, that's because it is. Racing through shopping malls, building sites, and a supermarket, scaring passers-by as you go - it's all very colourful and exuberant.

But don't go thinking that Furious Karting is particularly good - it isn't. Despite the nice locations, the courses don't tend to look much cop. The texturing is low on detail, and even these generally unspectacular sights are enough to cause noticeable slowdown.

The main horror is the handling, which is among the worst in any Xbox game. It's just so crushingly simple and hardly ever requires you to even brake. Your trigger finger will get horribly sore, as many races can be won by holding the accelerator down for the whole course.

It's all just a bit boring - something like a Mario Kart-style power slide manoeuvre might have spiced it all up a bit. But as it is, the uninvolving handling soon distils into tedium, and there's just not enough to it to keep you playing for long. File this under average - baseball bats or not.

1. Baseball bats
2. Right stick stunts

1. Some of the worst handling ever
2. Underwhelming visuals
3. Gets tedious quickly

Power
Nothing particularly notable or impressive to report. Your Xbox will hardly notice it's in there,

Style
The colourful locations are a bit cheap and cheerful, if truth be told. But cheerful i nice.

Immersion
Playing with the different tricks and weapons is diverting for a while. A short while.

Lifespan
The inial fun of battering opponents soon wears off and the dire handling begins to annoy.

Summary
It's playable enough, but quickly grows tiring thanks to the wafer-thin gameplay and average looks.