Lotus Challenge is the worst racing game ever made.
The first of countless ways where this game goes wrong is in it's physics system. In real life, if you hit a wall at a 180 degree angle moving at 93 mph, you will spin out of control, flip your car and die in a firery mess. When this act is commited in Lotus Challenge, however, you bump to the side slightly. Meanwhile, when you hit a wall front of your car first at 30 mph, you spin out of control. This ridiculous error does easily ruin the game.
But that's just the start of the faulted gameplay. The game essentially has absolutely no real sense of speed. This is because whether your going 100 mph, or 50 mph, or even 25 mph, the environments and cars basically move the same. That is, of course, if you can get the cars to move.
Now lets make something clear. There are a lot of games out there with bad controls, but man does this game have bad controls. To accelerate, you press the R button, and to move the gears, you press the A and X buttons. Shoulder button controls CAN work on consoles like the Xbox, but the Gamecube controller has a lay out that really isn't suited for this style of control at all. One instinctively wants to use the A button to accelerate, and this desire never goes away. Even worse is that you use the D-Pad in the game to call upon lights and horns, requiring you to take your hand off the control stick.
And then there's the graphics. I challenge anyone who reads this review to look at a screenshot of this game, go get some Play-Doh, and try to build replicas of these car models. Chances are, your designs will get pretty close. The environments are also boring and seriously look drawn with colored pencils. The game in motion is suprisingly awful looking, I can recall even some framerate drops.
The sound is really bland, unsurprisingly. The cars sound the same all the time and the music is just plain. And that's all I have to say about that.
The games presentation also is ridiculous. The menus are crowded with ridiculous amounts of information that is rushed at you way too fast. The menus basically use the colors yellow and purple constantly, and yellow and purple are not exactly the best looking colors when they're this drab. The manual in the game is even in black and white, and feels printed on computer paper. And when my friend got his copy, there was a staple missing in his manual.
For ever Mario Kart, Gran Turismo, Moto GP, Tourist Trophy, Forza Motorsport and Motor Toon Grand Prix, there is, unfortunately, a Lotus Challenge. I know that there are a lot of distinctively bad games out there, like Robocop and Superman 64, but Lotus Challenge very easily stands out in sheer disgrace. If you don't already get my point, let restate. Lotus Challenge is the worst racing game ever made.