3 Words: W O W
Graphics=0/10. Depends on what computer you play it on. Of course, it's not gonna look like Gran Turismo on your netbook with the 10 and a half-inch screen. Thankfully, that can be fixed. On the launcher, there is a tab where you can adjust various settings, and one of those is graphics quality, so you can prevent your game from looking like a slideshow on your netbook. On something like Alienware, listen to those Kohl's commercials: expect great things.
Controls=0/10. All 7 environments handle differently. The Island and Stadium cars have high speed and can corner well at those speeds of up to 1000 kph, but the Coast car, when improperly handled, barely turns unless you know how to drive.
Gameplay=9/10. All of the game modes are cool. Platform=Get to the finish line in one shot. Stunt=Use track pieces to pull off skateboard-style tricks and get to the finish in one shot before the timer runs out. Puzzle=Just plain boring. Online=Take on the world stage with various gameplay modes. There's also these cool things called Manialinks, which are sort of like web pages where you can buy tracks, musics, skins(custom car paint jobs), mods(which make the environment look different), and other cool stuff.
Customization=2/10. The track editor is good. That's the only good customizable feature. The Painter allows you to put a low-quality custom paint job on your cars. The music converter only changes the music for one challenge. The MediaTracker is a very awesome part of the track editor. Users like Crusard have created tracks that play like movies with this. Except for the Track Editor and MediaTracker, you're better off using external tools. Photoshop allows you to paint very high quality car skins without the limitations of the Painter, and you can simply find the original music on the Gamedata folder and replace it with all of your own *.OGG files. You can also import your own 3D models of cars, airplanes, Christmas trees, or whatever, for use as a vehicle in the game. You can find some of these 3D models of real cars, original designs, and even trees and airplanes on the Manialinks or at other websites.
You're probably tired of reading all of this stuff, so I'm just going to get to the bottom line and end this thing.
BUY THE DARN GAME ALREADY!!!