Game progression goes something like this; you buy an old garage, and your mechanic buddy Mike finds some blueprints when he's deciding what can be junked. He suggests building one of the three cars from the plans, so off he goes to construct it. Months later… And it's ready, now you need to go racing to impress punters and sell your new prototype. And so on…. Race your own make of cars (always picked from a choice of blueprints) in order to build more cars, earn "evoluziones" (evolved versions of the various car models) and there's also a decent (40ish) selection of real cars that becomes available in the single race mode should you keep winning. The four categories of cars (roadsters, sports cars, supercars and dream cars) get increasingly fast and exotic - apparently competition winners from real European design houses designed them. Keep winning races and you can expand your range of cars, and accordingly have to take on more employees (including a secretary that seems to have a 'thing' for you) and expand the factory until it ultimately resembles something Lotus or TVR would be proud of. In a nice effort at adding an RPG element to the game, you see your factory grow from the tatty filling station you start off with, and can wander around it to select cars, races and other options. You start off testing cars in the car park, but end up with your own test track. At the sales targets seem impossible to reach, but as you succeed and your reputation grows you sell them in larger numbers and the objectives come fast and furious… There's a veritable truckload of racing to do in this game.

The handling is responsive and the cars feel nimble and quick from the start, and as you add to their performance things get seriously quick (especially if you use the bumper cam view). Unlike many other racing games that are populated by boring drones that just follow a set line and pootle around like yer Gran, the opponents in Racing Evo are an aggressive bunch, often bumping you from behind to let you know you're not going fast enough. It can be annoying but if you watch the excellent replays you'll notice that they have their own battles as well, occasionally ending up in tears with cars spinning in all directions - it really makes a refreshing change to see some action going on with cars other than your own. The replays do suffer from some strange camera positioning though, with nothing as sensible or basic as a forward or rearward facing in-car camera view. Also in a game with such competitive AI and close racing, it seems remiss to not have rear view mirror - what were they thinking?

   

By the time you've won all the races in the main "dream mode", you'll have a sizeable selection (40-50) of gorgeous (and some not-so gorgeous) cars of various incarnations from manufacturers like Mercedes-Benz, Lotus, Dodge, Toyota and Aston Martin, and a decent two player split screen mode rounds things off nicely. There are 50 tracks, but these are variations set in four types of circuit set on three distinct continents so it doesn't feel like that many. You can change the in-game music for you own soundtrack, but shamefully this just plays one randomly selected song over and over (which is ok for short races but could drive you nuts on the rare longer ones). Good but not great, Racing Evo is very nice on the eyes but strangely unsatisfying due to the basic setup options and the limited amount of say you get in the design of 'your' cars - you just race and race (and then race some more) and then decide which drawing gets built the next time, it's as simple as that really.