Ferrari Challenge Trofeo Pirelli

Ah, Ferrari. To some, they represent the pinnacle of automotive engineering, producing cars which thrill, delight and excite. Fiery. Passionate. Inspiring.

To others, they’re the worst purveyors of branded tat since Manchester United, sticking their logo on everything from ear plugs to sat navs. In that light, an official Ferrari video game might easily have been churned out on the cheap by a developer who more normally makes games like Big Mother Truckers and Pimp My Ride.

Luckily, Eutechnyx (the developer of Big Mother Truckers and Pimp My Ride) have not actually phoned this one in, and the result is a certainly competent representation of the titular Trofeo Pirelli – but it’s not without its flaws.

Initial impressions are set by a sluggish and confusing menu system. You are able to change the name and country of your team, but your team name is limited to nine characters; I can’t even have “Team Simes”, let alone “Scuderia Awesome”. On top of this, there is either no option to change your name from the default “PLAYER” or I was unable to locate it within the tortuous menu system. Either way, the result’s the same – this is a tiny and insignificant feature in terms of development effort, but means a great deal to anyone actually playing the game.

Also lurking within the menu system is a livery editor for your cars. It’s very similar to the editor in Forza Motorsport 2, with the exception that there is no display for scaling or position coordinates, making it that much more difficult to produce a design with any degree of accuracy. A disappointing omission.

Finally, there’s a weird kind of Top Trumps game you can play against your PS3 with cards you win from achieving other things in the game. I have no idea why this is here.

But enough about all that guff, how does it drive?

Arguably the most important thing to have in a driving sim is a rock-solid frame rate. Unfortunately, Ferrari Challenge fails to achieve this, noticeably juddering in several cornering situations. The soundtrack alternates between bland and awful, although once turned off the effects are solid enough.

The game also suffers from a problem several racing games have; the qualifying times you’re required to beat seem to bear little resemblance to the abilities of the AI drivers you subsequently have to race, resulting in my very first race being a start from last place and a finish half a lap ahead in first. What this amounts to in practice is that, after the first time, you never bother with qualifying again.

The damage modelling is very slight and only cosmetic, making it easy to bumper-car your way to the front of a race, and the AI seems keener on driving carefully round the corners than actually competing with you. I saw no spectacular offs, and very little to evoke the thrill of an actual Ferrari Challenge race, which often end with bits of bodywork littering the track.