Review by: Brandon "Quad King" Cackowski-Schnell

ATV Quad Kings is as typical a racer as you're going to see. Make a list of what you'd expect to find in a handheld racing game, and this game has it. World tour mode? Check. Time trials? Check. Arcade mode? Check. Ability to buy new vehicles? Check. Continuous loop of blazing guitars and indiscriminate record scratching? Check. It's a decent racer with plenty of courses and challenging races as the stakes get higher and the difficulty level increases but there's nothing particularly noteworthy or innovative.

Upon starting up the game you'll have to create your racer, complete with picking from a predetermined set of numbers and picking your race colors. That's about as complicated as it gets, but seeing how you'll only ever see your racer from behind as they ride their four wheeled steed, you don't need much more. From there you'll buy your first ATV and start racing. World Tour mode consists a set sequence of races at various tracks around the world. As you win or lose you'll rise or fall in the overall rankings allowing for some ability to catch up to the leader should you flub a race.

Winning first place nabs you the purse for the circuit, however you can still unlock other circuits by placing high enough. As you race in tracks in World Tour mode they'll unlock in the game's other modes: Arcade and Time Trials. Arcade allows you to pick a course, pick a vehicle and get racing with your winnings combined with your career winnings from World Tour mode. There are no multi-race circuits here, just one track, a number of laps that you designate and a bunch of other riders. Time Trials is essentially the same as Aracde mode, only with no prize money and the game tracks your best lap time.

While riding you'll be sharing the track with five other racers all of whom can get pretty aggressive as you bump up the difficulty. Powersliding is key in this game, however abusing it is an easy way to wind up off the course and eating the exhaust and mud of your fellow racers. The AI is decent with no real rubber banding to speak of however you can lose a race if you choose to keep your racing style conservative in the interest of maintaining your lead. As you speed around the course you'll have the ability to run over boost tokens that give you the ability to trigger a burst of speed as well as money tokens in Arcade mode that nab you some extra coins. Some of the tokens lie in the best line for the given curve, some are way out of way and none of them reappear from lap to lap. It's a nice system that allows you to remain competitive as long as you're doing a competent job of racing however no amount of boost tokens are going to help you if you continually spin off of the track.

No ATV game would be complete without jumps and stunts and this one is no different. As you come off of jumps you can hit the X button to pull off a stunt and if you have enough time in the air to complete it before landing you'll get some extra cash. Failure to nail the trick causes you to spin out and probably lose a few places in the pack.

The game looks decent for the platform and the music is the usual bland blend of hard guitars and cheesy record scratching that seems to epitomize "eXtreme" sports. The ability to pick from a stable of unlocked vehicles for each event is nice, as is the ability to change the color however as there aren't any statistics or apparent differences in the vehicles other than price and engine powers, there's really no reason to ever use anything but the last thing you bought. As you progress through the world tour you'll have to buy more and more powerful vehicles but there's no way of knowing what vehicles are in a particular class and why you'd spend any money on the cheaper ones of the class you're looking to buy into. All of the vehicles handle the same too meaning that you're only ever trading up to qualify for additional races.

There aren't a lot of ATV racing games on the DS and that number gets even lower when you ask that the games be halfway decent. ATV Quad Kings doesn't do anything to innovate the genre but for twenty bucks there are plenty of tracks to race and vehicles to buy to justify the price tag and give the mobile ATV racing fan a way to get some mud on their visor during the morning commute.