Import Tuner Challenge is the latest game in the Tokyo Xtreme Racer series created by Genki. The series debuted on the Dreamcast, and had some sequels on the Playstation 2. Now we get to play it in next-gen on the Xbox 360. Import Tuner Challenge is all about tuning. Genki sets off with Import Tuner Challenge street racers on the loose in virtual recreations of Tokyo’s major highways with plenty of tuning options. Thing is, they forgot to put in decent gameplay.

Before you start the Quest Mode you need to purchase a car. You have a limited amount of money so you have not much choice what car to buy. The game features the most popular Japanese car brands like Mazda, Mitsubishi, Nissan, Subaru and Toyota. After you have chosen your car, you start driving around the roads of Tokyo. The idea of the game is to challenge other cars to earn money by winning. You challenge them by driving up to them, flash your headlights and the race is on. Each player gets a ‘power’ bar and when you crash or fall behind you lose some energy. The first player with an empty bar, will end up as the loser. Initially, winning races is hard, since your first car is powerless. But once you have tuned up your car a bit and found the best settings for your car, you no longer have as much trouble in beating the opposition.

You begin challenges by choosing a time of day and choosing the place to start on the track. Each racer on the road represents a team they are driving for. When you beat the whole team, you’ll get rewarded with new upgrades and stickers for your car and some new parts of the track. This is pretty much the game. You challenge a racer, race, challenge a racer, race, and that’s about it. This is the way you will complete the game.

The game has some more problems besides just being dull, the main problem is the AI of the CPU racers. The CPU players can’t take corners. You challenge a racer, take off, and as soon you encounter a corner on the Tokyo highways the CPU player will hit the brakes and limit their speed so you can get past them very easily. You can also beat opponents real easy by riding alongside them until you can direct them into a wall or a car. When you find out where you can do it on the track, you can repeat it again and again.

Two other problems with this game are the graphics and the sound. The graphics aren’t that great, the cars have a nice shiny paint on them, and that’s about it. There are aliasing problems everywhere and sometimes the game doesn’t load the track fast enough during the race, so you are driving in the sky with no track or environment. When you press the nitro button, you will get a fuzzy screen that’s seems a bit mixed up, nothing like the motion blur we are used to. For the tracks, it’s the most dull scenery I’ve ever seen. All you see is grey asphalt, here and there some black boxes surrounding the tracks that appear to be buildings, and sometimes some graphical bugs occur. When you are in preview modes in the garage for choosing your car it sometimes doesn’t load the correct data and doesn’t align the wheels right, and just places them somewhere in the middle of your car. You get the point.

The soundtrack isn’t that great either. It features some fast Japanese techno music. The beat of the music gets faster as you drive harder. And when you scratch something it simply stops the music instead of slowing down. This is really a game you want to use the custom soundtrack option for.

So is this a really bad game? Not if you are into tuning. The tuning part of this game is the best I’ve ever seen in a (next-gen) race game. You can change everything on the car. And the best part is, it really affects your car performance and handling. On every loading screen you get some tips and information about what every part does. If you are not a car expert you will get confused by all the options you have in the beginning, and you’ll probably don’t know the setting you just made affects the car positive or negative. But once you’ve tuned your first car and you think you are getting the hang of it you’re wrong. When you buy another car you will have to start all over again. Tuning your car to give you the best handling can take quite some time, but that’s what this game is about. Once you tuned your car enough and made the fastest car possible in the game, you can test your setup in the time trail mode or even better online on Xbox Live.

The time trail mode is nothing more than trying to beat the fastest default time on a track, so nothing new here. Racing online is the ultimate challenge for testing your car setup. Most of the people bought the fastest car in the game (Nissan Skyline GT-R), they customized it to the maximum and then you can really show off your tuning skills. The wide variety of parts makes it possible to create almost 5 million combinations and will ensure you that your car is unique on Xbox Live.

Wrapping it all up, Import Tuner Challenge is not a real good racer. Tuning your car will give enough variation, but you will notice that the gameplay isn’t that great and won’t really give you a challenge. What bothers me most is the fact that the overall presentation of the game gives the impression of a budget game to me, instead of a full featured product worth 60 bucks. If you really like racing games and don’t mind spending some quality game time on learning how to create the best setup for your car you might want to pick up this game for a budget price.

Final Score: 5 out of 10 (How do we rate games?)