Monster Truck Madness and its sequel were cartoonish at best. It featured real life giant trucks with huge wheels and colorful names (Bigfoot, Hollywood Hogan, Armstrong, Gravedigger, etc.,). It barely even nodded toward real world physics, though. Trucks performed like they were on the moon, rather than slipping and sliding through Earthly muck, which was fine because the track settings were bizarre and the gameplay was so much fun. If you go into 4x4 expecting identical gameplay to Monster Truck, you'll be pleased. But 4x4, with its licensed vehicles, looks, acts and feels like it should adopt a real-world physics, collision and damage model. It doesn't. And all the bouncing, gliding and frictionless shimmying gets in the way of immersion into the game.

There is no real sense of speed with these trucks, which is in keeping with monster trucks but not with 120MPH capable SUVs. There is no damage modeling at all, and only sketchy collision detection. It's frustrating to get stuck on a rock, go into a more distant camera view and find you're stuck on the thin air approximately 2 feet to the left of said rock. They also neglected to include any kind of force feedback API (probably due to the cross-platform nature of the game – but a significant, and disappointing omission nonetheless).

The game also doesn't seem to commit to realism or unrealism. An arcade racer has powerups, silly track boosts and traps, and other, well, silly additions to make the game more fun. Simulations tend to feature real licensed vehicles and allow for a lot of tweaking. 4x4 Evolution has all the trappings of a simulation: tires, engines, parts etc., can all be tweaked with limited grease monkey tools and this does impact performance, but doesn't make your drive feel any more authentic. Jokes about Firestone tires aside, the game doesn't even try to model what makes SUVs so dangerous in the first place. Real SUVs roll over easily, these trucks don't. Lastly, the game includes waterways, rivers and lakes, but if you land in them you can drive as normal at the bottom. Often escaping them and rejoining the race. (I wonder if my Cherokee can do that?) It was funny when they did this with Monster Truck, because the crazed announcer's voice would get all waterlogged, but here its just disappointing.

But all the above is only disappointing if you wanted a simulation. 4x4 Evolution will please most fans of arcade racing. The 16 tracks are beautiful and the terrain is varied. There are a lot of interesting obstacles, you are free to leave the track and drive wherever you want, and the opponent AI is fairly sharp. There are over 70 licensed trucks, including the Ford Explorer and trucks from Nissan, Lexus and Toyota.