If you’re rather partial to the racing genre, chances are you’re pretty chuffed with your 360. With the likes of Gotham 3, MotoGP 06, Test Drive and Ridge 6 already doing the rounds – and PGR4 and Forza 2 on the horizon too – Microsoft’s next-gen wonder seems to have all bases covered.

Sadly though, Import Tuner isn’t as good as PGR3, TDU et al. In fact, it’s not even as good as Need For Speed, Burnout Revenge and those rather more average efforts released over the past year. Indeed, it’s possibly the worst racing game to grace our favourite green-and-white box to date.

The problem isn’t so much what Import Tuner does, it’s what it doesn’t do that lets it down. The likes of the Gotham games might have long since left their Dreamcast heritage behind them, but the modest degree of changes made to Import Tuner aren’t enough to mask the six-year-old Dreamcast game that lurks underneath. This may ensure that the handling is reasonably well weighted (in a simplistic, arcade-y kind of way), but when pitted against a stunning racer like Test Drive, it becomes painfully clear how badly the game has aged.

While the cars look a bit nicer now that you can kit them out with the sort of garish paint jobs normally found on Novas and Fiestas the length and breadth of Essex, they unfortunately lack the deft weighting and balance of Gotham 3’s machinery, and the sensation of speed is sorely missing as well. The prospect of racing on motorways might inspire thoughts of weaving between traffic in a Burnout-style fashion, but the fact the motorways are typically only a couple of lanes wide and don’t feature the sheer number of cars or the intelligent traffic distribution of Criterion’s series, means this element is somewhat disappointing.

There’s a rather bland story tucked away in the Quest mode as well as the usual array of free-roam, multiplayer and time attack modes, but without a decent game to enjoy them, they seem quite pointless. With the 360 now kicking into top gear ahead of Christmas, there are certainly much better ways to spend £50.

Mark Podd