Group S Challenge from Capcom was a hard game to review. While playing it I saw a well-built game that seemed to try hard to be a Grand Turismo for the Xbox. It had lots of great licensed cars, outstanding visuals and sound, and controls that, while a little eccentric, were adequate for the task with a little familiarization. So the question is, "Why wasn't I having much fun?"

Let's get to the good stuff first. The graphics are near photorealistic. My wife glanced in while I was playing and thought I was actually watching a race. The light, shadow and reflection effects were really amazing. All the available cars look terrific - as does the scenery as it zips by with nary a slowdown.

Sound was also outstanding. It ranged from a nice throaty rumble to a screaming whine that gave a good sense of power when pumped through the home theater system.

Licensed cars abound. Cars from 21 manufacturers around the world are available for the player to purchase, race and upgrade. All look and handle well. Of course this is a two-edged sword. Manufacturers don't like to see their cars beaten up on the track so there is no damage model in the game. There's nothing like hitting a wall at 100 miles an hour and just bouncing off to break the illusion of being involved in real racing. Of course in defense of this "feature", most races would be over pretty quickly if what put a real car out of action put a video game car out of the race.

A variety of pretty well designed tracks give players the chance to race all over the world and the tracks have nicely detailed backgrounds. It is in the area of game play that Group S Challenge starts to lose points. The play modes are nothing fresh. They mocked Grand Turismo so well that it felt like I'd done it all before right out of the box.

The five other cars the player races against have only the most rudimentary AI. If the player falls behind, they slow to a crawl. The lack of damage made the best strategy to drive at full speed to the inside of the curves, hit the leading cars that had slowed down for the curve, and bounce off them into the lead. It didn't take long to figure out that one.

Multiplayer is limited to only two players with no system link or Xbox Live support. The inclusion of a better multiplayer package might have made up for the poor AI performance a little.

As mentioned before, the control is a little eccentric. The controls can be reconfigured in a limited way, but the steering always seemed to tend toward over steering. One other very small gripe; I can't use my own favorite racing tunes! No provision to take advantage of this simplest of Xbox features was included.

As I said, this is a difficult game to rate. It looks and sounds beautiful, but with its game-play shortcomings, I have to give Group S Challenge a "7". Other players could well disagree. The best strategy might be to give this one a rental and see if it appeals to you.

One note on the review system for this game: I used a standard Xbox "Duke" controller for this review. Group S Challenge does support steering wheels such as the Thrustmaster, but it was not tested here.