Too hard for you to ever unlock its likely considerable rewards.
Bad: Everything is hampered to an incredible extent due to the difficulty - even the multiplayer, as you can't really unlock anything
F-Zero GX is one of those "hardcore" games for the people who remember the good old days in the arcades where every game was so mercilessly hard. Of course, this translated initially to game consoles, but as people realized that the object with them was to sell games and not make people spend more money, the game difficulty has gradually decreased. So occasionally, to satisfy the hardcore arcade players who are still playing games like Battletoads frown upon all current games for being too "easy", a game that harks back to the old days with its incredibly unforgiving playing mechanics and incredible difficulty causes one of those old-school gamers to grin again, if only for a bit.
F-Zero GX is one of those games that will make you cry, that will make you throw your controller away in fury and quite possibly break it and your Gamecube, that will make you furiously stamp on the disc until its broken into little shards, UNLESS you are somebody with superhuman capabilities. The real shame here is that there's tons of good stuff to see in F-Zero GX, but the game is so ridiculously hard that most people will never find it - a fact that most of the reviews you see won't mention, because game reviewers are so practiced at games that challenges like this are welcomed rather than turned away.
F-Zero GX is FAST in a way that no other racer is, which is a good thing. The tracks move by at breakneck speed even in the first lap - when you don't even have a boost. By the second lap all hell will have virtually broken loose, but this isn't Mario Kart - this game's all about racing, and all you have is your car, your boosting capabilities (which will decrease your car's condition), and the occasional speed boosts scattered around the track. You'll also have what is basically a skid ability.
F-Zero GX tracks mainly rely on track memorization for you to beat them so that you'll know exactly when to start the next turn and what's coming up next and how sharply you need to go to make the turn after. Otherwise, even game reviewers will admit that your case is somewhat lost already - everything moves at so fast a speed that you simply can't rely on your skills alone, even if they're incredible.
The multiplayer's solid because you're not racing against the godly bots, even if you will crash a lot. However, it's hampered since you can't really unlock much due to the difficulty of the single-player, and, in the fashion of a lot of racers, you certainly won't get the full experience of F-Zero GX without unlocking all the characters and other stuff.
Moving on. The graphics are incredible for a Gamecube game of 2003 - simply amazing. The screenshots really don't get it - you have to see this game to believe the incredible sense of speed you get as the track blurs past you, which makes it all the more impressive that the screenshots themselves look any good, as you really don't see all that much of the track.
The soundtrack consists of tricked-out old F-Zero tunes, although they're remixed, and it might have been preferable to just have the old tunes from the old games. The sounds themselves are excellent.
There's probably a lot of value in this game, what with its wealth of unlockables. For people who can handle the difficulty, they can probably play this for month on end. For the rest of us who were deceived by the reviews, though, the value is terrible - a game that you'll undoubtedly put away after vainly trying to beat it after a mere few days, or a week if you're really persistent. It's boosted a little by the solid and fun multiplayer split-screen, but even this is mostly negated because you can't play anything that you haven't unlocked, and only a few things are unlocked at the start.
This game could have been a superb game - 9.0+, a terrific arcade racer for everybody. Instead, they just made it too hard.