Talk to a professional racecar driver, and chances are he'll tell you he got his start in a go-kart. Not the three-horsepower retooled lawn mower you'll find in an amusement park, mind you, but a lighting-quick ground-hugging racing kart. Curiously, PC racing game developers have largely ignored karting, instead focusing on the rarified environments of Formula 1 or NASCAR. One of the very few companies to even offer a kart-based game is Montreal's Microids, which has just released Open Kart, a promising and feature-packed racing game that regrettably suffers from unsophisticated physics, limited difficulty, and potential instability. If you're a veteran PC racer, Open Kart is one of those games you'll really want to like and will undoubtedly enjoy for a few hours. However, odds are that you'll ultimately find it disappointing.

Open Kart looks promising at first...

Open Kart is a big and outwardly impressive game. When you first boot the program, you'll immediately be struck by the quality of the opening animation, the slick look of the interfaces, and the depth and intuitiveness of the menu screens. A battery of graphic, audio, and control options is available to tailor the game to the speed of your computer and your preferred style of driving, and a massive variety of racing modes seems ready to cater to virtually every skill level. Career mode grants entrance into an entire world of racing, wherein you'll purchase and sell parts, experience the intricacies of the garage, and learn how to modify your aggression in accordance with the current balance of your bank account. Arcade mode allows you to instantly and randomly compete on one or any combination of the game's tracks without first submitting to the setup and general maintenance complexities of a full career. Time attack mode places you alone on the track, where your only company is the faithfully recorded ghost image of your last lap. Multiplayer lets you race with other friends or foes, although it does not offer a split-screen option for single computer play or a dedicated server for Internet competition, and thus is quite restrictive.

Sadly, the game is not nearly as versatile as it first appears. The physics model, for example, differs almost imperceptibly from arcade to career modes and therefore affords little variance for those who might prefer a more strenuous or less taxing ride. The game's level of difficulty is preset and unalterable, thereby forcing you to contend with the same quality of artificial intelligence and physics from beginning to end. An even bigger problem lies in the way Microids designed its driving model. Simply put, an Open Kart kart just doesn't feel like the real thing. They'll glide instantly across the track with just a touch of the joystick, yet exhibit wheel spin only when pushed beyond all reasonable limits. Drifting your rear tires through a sharp turn seems more like a gravity-defying maneuver than a planned loss of adhesion, braking is strangely free of lockups and skids, and spinouts occur only when a fellow competitor tags you hard on the rear corner.

...but you'll finish it in no time.

Yet although the ride is simplistic and clearly leans toward arcade rather than simulation, it is not necessarily unpleasant. In fact, your miniature racer won't fail to dazzle you with its snappy acceleration, rocketing top speeds, and agile cornering. The game features such advanced factors as high-speed slipstreaming and rewards those who adopt authentic cornering trajectories and early braking techniques. The inclusion of "carb blocking" is particularly impressive, where drivers temporarily impede the carburetor's air intake during the deceleration phase in order to achieve a short performance boost down the next straightaway. As players will soon see, the AI drivers do it all the time.