Ford Bold Moves Street Racing (Xbox)

Still, the system is far from perfect. Its biggest flaw is the brain-dead AI of every car on the road that you are not controlling, which also includes your teammates. Cars will routinely ram you into corners or into obstacles--be they friend or foe. It's especially frustrating when trying to pull off double draft maneuvers. You first pass your teammate and then expect him to pass you up in return, thus completing the move. Instead, your teammate will barrel into the back of your car 80 percent of the time, making little if any attempt to get out of your way. Beyond these more obvious gaffes, there's just no subtlety to the game's level of challenge. While keeping track of three cars at first seems tough, it isn't long before you figure out the key to almost any team race in the game. Step 1: Get your fastest car into the lead position; if your car is hot enough, it'll have no trouble staying there. Step 2: Get your second fastest car into the second-place position, where it'll likely fit just fine. Step 3: You see where this is going, right? Beyond some simple jockeying for position here and there, if the cars you enter into the race are fast enough, you'll have little, if any, trouble dominating the entire game.

As you go through team races, you'll earn cars and unlock new cars that you can purchase in the showroom, as well as a series of challenge events. These challenges are a good way to earn extra cash so you can afford the high-performance class vehicles later in the game, but the challenges themselves are a pretty sorry bunch. You can race in time-trial, individual-team, and solo races, as well as overtake challenges, but beyond earning money, there's not much reason to spend an extended amount of time on these challenges.

Because rubbing bumpers occurs so frequently in Bold Moves, your cars go from pristine to banged up pretty quickly, especially in some of the longer championships. And while the cars do suffer a good deal of cosmetic damage, including cracked windshields, scratched and scuffed paint jobs, and bumpers hanging on by a thread, there's barely anything in the way of performance degradation, even after crashing many, many times at top speed. Where damage takes its toll is in the repair costs, which are required to get the car back to tip-top shape. But, then again, if car performance isn't really affected, there's not much of a need to repair it, is there?

In the end, this is a garden-variety racing game. And that garden is full of boredom.

The presentation in Bold Moves is straightforward and unglamorous. The cars themselves look fine, and there are no frame rate issues to complain about. The race environments--mostly urban reproductions of Los Angeles and surrounding areas--are dull, lifeless, and an absolute bore to look at (which, come to think of it, is a pretty apt description of downtown LA). Even the more rural tracks are repetitive and devoid of any kind of background movement that would help keep this game visually interesting. Worse yet, it's a racing game with no visible sense of speed. Even the most powerful cars in the game offer little, if any, thrill and are characterized more by their slippery handling than by their sheer power. The sound of the car engines, which to the game's credit is probably accurate on a car-by-car basis, makes about as little impact as the game's vanilla musical soundtrack. The controls in the console versions of Bold Moves are simple, and the cars are actually nice and responsive. Unfortunately, in the PC version of the game you must drive using the keyboard, and while it's possible to play the game this way, it's about the furthest imaginable thing from "fun."

When people complain about racing games because they are boring, Ford Bold Moves is exactly the kind of game they are talking about. The team-centric racing concept here is a good one, but it's weighed down by dumb AI, boring environments, and a generally uninteresting racing engine. Ford fans might appreciate an all-in-one place to drive their favorite cars, but there's not much else to offer virtual racers who are looking to mix things up.

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