ATV: Quad Power Racing gives the player the opportunity to check out four different modes: Championship (Amateur or Pro), Single Race, Time Attack and Two-Player (Single Race and Time Attack). Even though Jeremy McGrath Supercross 2000 wasn’t much fun, there was at least an attempt to innovate by incorporating some interesting new types of modes, but ATV: Quad Power Racing has stuck to the standard path with the same features as every other racer on the market. Needless to say, even if someone somehow found this game in the realm of “fun”, they would be hard pressed to find much to do after completing the Championship and toying in two-player.

In total, there are twelve tracks that take place in three environments: snow, mountain and desert. Each section is then divided into four or so individual races, but all of the tracks have the same feature of being both completely bland and totally uninteresting to look at. The artists of ATV: Quad Power Racing must have spent most of their time on creating the one tree that is repeated over and over and over and over throughout each environment. There is nothing of real interest to attract your attention while racing, except for the occasional house off to the side. No activity, other than what is happening in the actual race, is present. And my lord, whoever was the group that was hired to pull together the environments should be shot; there are texture seams everywhere at every instant. There is literally not a single moment where textures and polygons are ripping apart and bursting out of the spots that they’re laying on, begging for you to remove them from this awful game.

The lack of any real environmental activity, however, leads to probably the one decent thing about ATV: Quad Power Racing: the frame rate. Climax decided that instead of working on all the other aspects of graphics, they would work on one heck of a speedy and constant frame rate. Whether it’s in two-player mode or with three other racers on the screen in the normal one-player game, the frame rate is usually at a steady pace. While it isn’t quite so impressive in light of the pretty pitiful environments, most Acclaim titles pay little attention to such a small “detail” as frame rate or slowdown, but at least ATV: Quad Power Racing is able to leap over this one single hurdle.

The music and sound effects are of course fun-filled; the music basically consists of the same basic beats repeated over and over for the eight or so minutes that make up each race. Fortunately, the sound effects coming from the ATV’s motor usually overpower any of the horrid music radiating from the TV, so there’s nothing much to worry about there.

As seems to be the case with most Acclaim titles, little attention was put toward the development of decent artificial intelligence that actually has a sign of intelligence. In a nutshell, the computer-controlled ATVs work in the way that at one point they’ll be whipping behind your racer and unable to catch up, and then all of a sudden when you’re pulling off perfect turns around the track they will be able to wing around with no effort. The AI basically flip flops around from being faster than any other racer out there to racers who lack that gray matter up in the head called “brain”.

Haven’t we been through this before? Another licensed Acclaim title that had some promise at the start, but lost all of it as development wore on, and by the time the final product rolled around, there’s nothing worth playing? ATV: Quad Power Racing follows that tradition, and thus, avoid this one and nab one of the many other excellent racing titles available on the PlayStation.