Nail’d

It's not the only inconsistency. Hit a sign at full tilt and you may merely be shunted to the side; touch a seemingly innocuous patch of snow on landing and your ATV spectacularly explodes. On one track, I guided my bike towards a seemingly friendly strip of flat tarmac only to watch it disintegrate on impact before I was reset to the dirt track on the right, about 100 yards further forward. It's understandable that Techland doesn't want you too far away from the action, but those invisible walls should either be pushed back a little, or the courses more tightly reined in.

It's both a compliment and an insult to say that each course doesn't really feel so much like a track tailored for tournament racing as a large expanse of land purchased by a group of Pepsi Max-swilling jackasses for the purposes of causing themselves extreme injury. Like FUEL's events, there's a ramshackle, hand-crafted feel that might fit the game world but hardly makes for a finely-honed race experience.

There are so many alternate routes that it's nigh-on impossible to truly learn a level, and there's no nuance whatsoever to the boost system, meaning you've mastered all there is to know within minutes of sliding the disc into your console. And by front-loading a number of its most spectacular moments – like leaping between corrugated iron platforms suspended from helicopters, to name but one example – Techland leaves itself nowhere to go.

The structure of the tournaments, which forces you to replay earlier stages to unlock new ones, lessens the impact of the set-pieces, too. Screeching across a runway just as a jet engine passes overhead is a wonderful moment the first time it happens, less so when it's repeated during later events. Meanwhile, the unlockables are hardly worthy of the time taken to earn them, with new parts, skins and decals fairly scant reward for what can be a bit of a time-sink.

Yet, for the first couple of hours at least, there's an exhilarating thrill to barrelling through the pretty scenery at blistering speed. It's a pity that boosting bleaches out the visuals, as the oversaturated environments are gorgeous in places. Ignore the rather cheap front end and it's quite the technical powerhouse – a little rough around the edges, perhaps, but the combination of scale and smoothness is remarkable. It all moves at a hell of a lick with nary a hint of a frame-rate drop even as Techland spatters water and mud on the camera. Impressive, especially given that publisher Deep Silver is hardly known for having the most capacious pockets in the business.

As relentlessly daft and shallow as it is, Nail'd is a very hard game to dislike. It's almost tailor-made for a weekend rental, which should give you enough time to rinse the single-player, have a few knockabout online races, and return it before the simplicity and repetition sours the happy memories of your brief time with it. A must-try rather than a must-buy, then, but Nail'd deserves to be experienced, even if you can feel your brain cells depleting the longer you play.