Jet Set Radio Future offers plenty of eye candy when it comes to the visuals. Now with an area up to three times the size of the areas in Jet Set Radio, you can expect to find a world with lots of activity from casual pedestrians to traffic in the streets. In one area when you're sliding down off a roof top, you'll see hundreds of birds parking themselves in your way and as you skate through them they fly away. Small touches like that just brings the world more alive. The pedestrians are all over the place and will try and get out of your way as you tear by them. The world itself just feels alive with the amount of activity going on. All of this takes place with a pretty consistant framerate of 60 fps. While there is a slight bit of slowdown here and there, it's pretty infrequent and shouldn't be a concern to the the enjoyment of the game.

What made Jet Set Radio so fun was its new and different gameplay. Well not much has changed in the sequel, but that doesn't make the gameplay any less fun. Smilebit felt that they should streamline the tagging process by taking out the multi-motion input commands for some of the logos. Now it's the simple press of a button when you're near an icon. The biggest gameplay change has to be in your ability to do tricks. While grinding, if you tap the button, you can do these small mini tricks which will chain into a combo. It is also easier to do tricks in the air as well as more forgiving on landing on objects to continue your grind. Like the original, gameplay consists of trying to tag a complete area, racing against other people, avoiding the police, tagging people, and so forth.

What was actually quite a bit of fun was to simply to work on doing tricks within the environments as there are so many places to grind and enough places to jump from one rail to another to continue your trick scoring spree. While there wasn't really much of a point to it, it sure looked cool and was fun to mess around with.

Jet Set Radio Future also sports up to four player multi-player mode. Unfortunately, I only got a look at the race mode in which everyone races around a given track for a number of laps. It's about as straight forward as it sounds. What was cool to see in the multi-player mode was that the framerate was still a constant 60 fps. Another neat addition was the number of characters that were selectable. A total of 24 are available to choose from.

Sega was nice enough to give us a CD with some of the music featured in the game. This was great since it was hard to hear at the event how things sounded. I'm glad they did because I really do like some of the tunes they've included this time around. On top of the great music, Jet Set Radio Future will be one of the first titles to sport the Dolby Digital 5.1 logo which thus far has been missing from other games even if the mix was in full 5.1.

My only complaints so far are issues that could easily change as you progress through the game. The first being the areas seem to be too large with very little to do take advantage of that space. As a result, it seems like you're moving around for awhile without anything to do other than to get to the next point to do something. Because of this, the pace of the game seems somewhat slow. The only other complaint I have is that it doesn't seem like they added much to evolve the gameplay. Most of the changes that were emphasized had little to do with the actual gameplay.

While there isn't really anything new as far as gameplay goes, the game is still a blast to play. Expect more of the same and you won't be let down. Sega's first Xbox title is a blast and should please fans of the original. Check back for our review as soon as we're able to put more time into it and check out all the other levels within the game.