Taking place in a spread of locales, you race over close to a dozen, badly designed tracks. Actually, to say "race" is already misleading; "drive" would be more appropriate. Tantalus seems to think we have a good length of wool and astounding ignorance over our eyes but it's glaringly obvious of their egregious shortcut: You never see more than two competitors on the track at the same time. Meaning that each CPU unit travels at the same speed, each taking the same turns in the very same fashion, each one never having a ghost of a chance of catching up or falling in position.

And doesn't that beat every ounce of what a racing game should be? It's more akin to a Sunday drive and you're the macho yahoo that has to turn everything into a competition. So keeping in mind that affecting the opponents' indelible and set path of motion is a big impossibility, the physics of collisions are entirely skewered: Touching them from one side will send you flying up the track at 100 miles an hour or either pushes you off the track completely, while they continue to chug along blithely.

The tracks themselves are far too wide (enough to act as a landing strip for planes or an artificial fjord for ship barges) to present any challenge while driving and all the turns are easy to handle and master. Only the last track seems to have been developed with any sort of concentration or effort, but that one takes place on a city road and even the slightest turn on that track makes the most obnoxious screeching sound ever heard by the ear of man.

There are three difficulty modes, each one required to be completed in order to move to the next difficulty tier. In Stock difficulty, you need to place 3rd on each track. In Pro, it's 2nd. And in Open, it's 1st. However, in one of the most illogical design choices ever, each time you start a new difficulty, the amounts of laps allocated to the track is increased by one. So though you have to rank one spot higher, you're given more time and more opportunities to accomplish it, squeezing out any challenge the game may have had.

And that's it. The game ends when you finish all three difficulties (which shouldn't take more than two or so hours) with nothing more to offer than a scrolling list of the criminals who made the game, and though you could've seen it coming a mile away, there was a faint hope that a little something more would've been offered.

Simply put, ATV Quad Power Racing an exhaustingly awful game with programming you'd expect to see in a flash movie and tracks that were probably made with a half-finished level editor from a freeware site. Exhume the ET carts from its landfill sepulchre, or at least make some room next to it, because there is no reason for garbage like this to exist in the range of human decency and no place for it on our planet's immediate surface. Absolutely pathetic.

· · · Sqoon