The Fast and the Furious review

That start-up cash is enough to get either an okay car that you can’t afford to customize or a not so-okay bucket of bolts that you can tune up a bit when you get more scratch. That doesn’t take more than a few hours – half of which you’ll spend racing, the other half staring at a painful amount of dreadfully long loading screens. It’s not too hard to score dough and win some cars, although there are a few random tough guys who’ll force you to tinker around in the shop to get things just right.

Nifty features do abound: an admirably vast customization system, the "semi-automatic" transmission option (in which you upshift manually), and the drift gauge, designed to help you slide sideways with the best of them. Plus, the races that have you charging up and down mountains aren't something you see every day. Lamentably, every little perk has something like ordinary visuals or a hyper-repetitive soundtrack to counter it.