The game, however, sometimes feels like a sports car towing a dump truck; you sense the game started as a decent arcade racer, and that all the other vehicles were afterthoughts. The tracks are designed for performance cars, with lots of turns, dips, and hills. There are some tracks with long straight-aways, but most are demanding precision tracks or rally-type courses. Missing are tracks tuned for any of the goofy vehicles like the monster trucks or the bus. The monster trucks yearn for sand dunes or a sports arena with man-made jumps and things to crush. The combat cars work well on the existing tracks but would be more fun with some additional exotic places to drive around. The ability to put vehicles where you wouldn't normally see them is interesting but Breakneck needs more track types. As is, the monster trucks bounce too much on the precision tracks and players will spend more time crashing than having fun. The same is true of the buses and truck cabs, which are too cumbersome to drive in the often tight tracks.

There are a few tracks that suit the larger vehicles, and we enjoyed racing the lumbering semi trucks around the their generous wide curves. Still, most of the tracks undercut the excitement of the non-racer vehicles, making their inclusion seem wasted. If Breakneck wanted to draw some of the extreme vehicle crowd, it should have included some extreme vehicle arenas. Will what's left of Breakneck serve the sports car or combat racing crowd?

Breakneck's approach works, but only if you lighten the load on your expectations. It's certainly competent enough fare for arcade racing, but don't expect it to be the best racer in all the categories it tries to support. Simple arcade racing here is solid and the only thing that really bugged us were some AI quirks. The AI drivers seem to emerge from bumps and collisions far less scathed than the human player. This was a real problem in the non-combat racing games because the first lap becomes crucial, with drivers surviving the initial crowded nudging pulling away with insurmountable leads while the other drivers fight for survival. With practice, you can learn to avoid some crashes and stick close to the action, but falling behind is usually a curtain call. The AI also seemed tuned to sports car driving, and often mishandled the non-standard vehicles like the monster trucks. Breakneck, however, does offer some relief in the form of high customization. Dozens of settings exist to curb the AI strength and general game leniency. If you like the feeling of being in the pack, turn on the setting that forces AI drivers to let you catch up from behind and let them speed up when you're in front.

Like the AI or not, that's probably all you'll see unless you have a LAN installed at home. Breakneck's multiplayer suite supports IPX on networks and direct connections via serial cable or modem, but the TCP/IP support requires you to know a specific IP address. Breakneck will try to search for existing games if you can't specify an address, but it's unfortunate that this arcade racer doesn't make multiplayer gaming more accessible via hosted online services like MPlayer or the Microsoft Network Gaming Zone. We ventured to the listed websites, but THQ's site didn't even mention Breakneck, and the Breakneck site wasn't in English.