When gaming mascots turn to novelty kart racers in a desperate attempt to 'do a Mario', it's usually a sign that all is not well. And although the karts have been replaced with surfboards - there's no tarmac to trample or motorways to mow through - Sonic Riders hardly bucks the trend for average kart-based capers. It's Sonic and co surfing the skies, but it's not done with any style or flair, sadly.

You'll be catapulting off a huge spider's web, riding a giant centipede and getting shot hundreds of feet through the air by a crossbow. Sounds thrilling, except it isn't really. There's a clever gimmick too, of course - each stage has multiple routes and shortcuts to take, depending on your racer's category (Speed, Fly or Power). Speed types can grind twisting rails, Flyers use hoops to shoot through the air and Power riders can smash through walls to discover secret paths. Hitting A at the right time on a ramp causes your rider to do a huge jump, allowing you to pull off stunts to charge up your Air bar, which powers your board.

Of course, no Sonic game is complete without Dr Eggman, and as usual he's after those Chaos Emeralds. Story mode sees him setting up a tournament to determine the fastest racer. Of course, Eggman does nothing without a world dominating motive, so he gets competitors to pay one Chaos Emerald each to race. It could have been a pioneering set-up for a Sonic game, but it just ends up as little more than tit-for-tat arguments between Sonic and Eggman's team of racers.

Unfortunately, the gameplay is just as disappointing. For some stupid reason, the board's natural speed is much slower than Sonic if he just got off and walked, and that's just not right. To pick up the pace, you have to ride the turbulence streams (tubes of wind) created by a racer ahead. Once you're inside a stream, you can perform stunts that fill up your Air bar.

Your control is completely taken away during these on-rails sections, though, thus sapping the already small amount of fun you'll be having. You can manually recharge your Air by spinning the Left stick, but apart from that all there is to do is watch as your rider splashes down a waterfall towards the next section before full control is resumed.

The handling, during the bits where it actually lets you control your rider, is also unresponsive, an unforgivable flaw in the superfast futuristic racer genre. It's almost as if the gameplay was made with different tracks in mind. The walls are unavoidable, and you'll find it difficult to complete a course without falling off.

Multiplayer tries its best to save the day, though. Up to four mates can enjoy bouncing each other into the walls, but surprisingly there's no Live support. Aside from standard racing, look out for Tag mode, where teams of two share the same Air bar in a race to the finish. Nothing groundbreaking but at least there's some fun to be had.

Overall, though, with its fundamentally flawed handling, glitchy physics and a tendency for the game to just play itself, Sonic Riders is a huge disappointment. We were hoping for high-speed thrills to rival any futuristic racer, but instead it's a sluggish ordeal of wall-bashing frustration. Sonic Riders should be damned to the bargain bucket with Crash Tag Team Racing.

1. The extreme courses feature multiple routes that you can explore with the different abilities of each character.
2. Courses are set in the vividly coloured and detailed fantasy environments you'd expect from a Sonic game.

1. The unresponsive handling wrecks the whole experience. It's simply not possible to stay off the walls.
2. The Story mode is uninspired, and has some of the most annoying dialogue in any Sonic game.
3. The game takes your steering controls away far too often. Racing on rails is no fun at all.

A flawed, frustrating racer with terrible handling. Plays so bad even die-hard Sonic fans should stay well away.