SBK 07: Superbike World Championship (PlayStation 2)

There's a pretty robust multiplayer aspect to the game if playing the singleplayer isn't the only thing you're into. You can have two players compete against each other in any race in either the quick race or time trial modes. You can choose the usual bike, rider and opponent AI in the option menu but there are no handicap settings for the players, so if you're a seasoned veteran taking on a newbie arcade racer things might be a little unfair. It might have been nice to be able to set the more experienced player onto sim mode and the new player to arcade, but alas, you can't.

There's no online multiplayer options or even a link to the PSP, but these are minor niggles in a pretty fine game.

So with this top-notch gameplay comes some pretty impressive control and physics. When the game's set on simulation mode you can really see how the bike physics interacts with the animations (which are excellent) and lends the feeling of a struggle between the rider and the high speed performance bike. But what sold it for me were the helmet-bending, bone-jarring, bike-crunching crashes that can be just as fun to cause as winning the game by a hair's breadth.

The sound in the game is a little lack-lustre compared to the rest of it, the bikes sound Ok. You have generic rock combined with a repetitious average crowd audio, it somewhat leaves you under-whelmed in that respect and takes away from the game. You get some nice but simple presentation, a quick loading screen video of one of 11 tracks (which are chosen from Silverstone, Brands Hatch, Donnington in the UK and Monza, Valencia and some more for international players and fans) which are available from the start of the game.

The graphics aren't bad, the track graphics are fairly sparse to keep the PS2's frame-rate within acceptable levels and stable. You can see that the developers have tweaked their engine to rely on the wow-physics factor and control compared to being shiny and graphically amazing. It's still a decent looking game but plays much better than it looks and for me that is another bonus. I'd rather play something with good gameplay and average graphics compared to a stunner that plays like a turkey.

You can unlock numerous things as you play and complete various challenges, come first in a race to unlock cool options and play more to unlock cheats, videos and so on. It doesn't skimp on the unlockable content part and more games need to follow this pattern, there used to be a time when games would reward players for actually persevering with them.

All in all, it's a surprisingly good game with a few nice touches. It certainly appeals to the casual gamer as well as the hardcore simulation rider, especially since the developers have developed such a good bike-sim engine to wrap their game around. I'd like to see what they'd be capable of on the 360 or the PS3, to see if they were able to produce a highly polished bells & whistles version of this kind of title wrapped around next-gen gameplay and graphics.

I suppose we'll have to wait and see on that.