Within ten minutes of loading up ATV Offroad Fury 4 I'd already pulled off a backflip on a quad bike. This was a good sign. I'd also spent around six of those ten minutes laughing as my in game character fell off said quad bike, no doubt shattering the vast majority of his bones and turning his insides to paste in the process. Heh, look at him, crashing head first into the top of a thirty foot high billboard at eighty miles an hour, little arms and legs flailing about! Another ten minutes in and I'm grinning broadly, throwing a buggy around a tight dirt track, watching the points rack up as I take a hairpin sideways, on two wheels, undertaking three AI opponents in the process. As I cross the line in a comfortable first, moving that little bit closer to being crowned amateur champion, I can't help but do a victory fist clench. I can't help it because ATV: Offroad Fury 4 is fun, pure and simple. Sure, it has its faults, but more often than not you can look past them, to the big, stupid, almost brilliant game that lies beyond.

There are the usual console racing game options on the menu screen: multiplayer, single race, a career mode called Story and a track editor. Single race is pretty self explanatory: choose one of the four kinds of vehicle available - Quad Bike, Dirt Bike, Buggy and Truck - and thrash round a dirt-splattered race track for five laps. Story mode is a little more complex, requiring you to compete in championships to earn licenses to progress as an ATV rider. Like I said, only a little more complex. You can tune the engines on your vehicles and upgrade various bits of them, but there's no subtlety to the tweaking and tinkering; make money, buy the next upgrade, go faster. You won't spend hours in the garage, setting up the gearbox for the best possible performance in a specific race, milking the last drop of power out of your engine; you'll be far too busy upside down, your legs dangling off the back of whichever brightly coloured bike/quad you're trying valiantly to hold on to.

The best thing about story mode is that it doesn't tie you down to one vehicle; to progress you'll need to succeed on at least two, a light (bike or quad) and a heavy (truck or buggy), and to complete all of the races you'll need to master the lot. The class system is well implemented; each of the vehicles, with the possible exception of the truck, feels and handles differently from the others, significantly changing the play experience and in some cases the game mechanics. The light vehicles, as well as being a lot faster than the heavies, can pull off huge jumps and tricks. To get even more air, a bunny hop system, similar to the Flickit controls in skate, has been implemented. At the top of a ramp or slope, pull back the left analogue stick, then flick it forwards to throw yourself higher and further. The tricks are controlled in the usual Tony Hawk fashion, with a few combinations of button and d-pad presses allowing you to stick various limbs into a multitude of death-, and chiropractor-, defying positions. There are freestyle sections of the game where you're competing to beat the trick scores of AI opponents, riding around solo in a specially designed trick arena. The bigger and better tricks you pull off, the more points you score, and the more points you score, the more cash you make. This is also true in the race sections of the game; if you're on a quad or a bike you can make extra money during a race by performing some insane stunts. Obviously this isn't the case with the heavy classes, where you get a stylish driving bonus instead; get some air off a jump, pull a powerslide or two and the bonus shoots up, giving you more points and more cash. It's not as in-depth as Project Gotham's Kudos system, but it adds an interesting edge to the proceedings when you know that if you do one more trick or a few metres of slide you'll be able to afford a better engine for the next race.

Now it's time for the "buts" and sadly there are quite a few of them. Most can be ignored, or at the very least tolerated, but one or two are so annoying that they almost manage to spoil a good game. First of all, the petty stuff. ATV: Offroad Fury 4 is ugly - six shots, twelve pints and a head injury ugly. I know it's on a last gen console, but that's no excuse; this is a hideous, hideous game. The bikes and buggies wouldn't look out of place on an N64, while the "weather effects" amount to the pixelated brown spray coming off your wheels changing to pixelated grey spray. The characters in the cut scenes you're subjected to between rounds in the story mode are deformed, soulless creatures with some of the oddest hair I have ever seen in a videogame. It honestly took me five minutes to work out if my character was supposed to look like that, if he was wearing a hat, or if his head was dissolving into some sort of yellow, angular blob. Ugliness aside, the storyline that runs through story mode is idiotic, tacked on nonsense that sounds like it was written by a five-year-old during a break at school. The voice acting is unintentionally hilarious and it all feels like a big, entirely unnecessary waste of time and processor power.

Thankfully though, you can skip the cut scenes. You can also turn off the dire music, featuring a variety of bands I've never heard of that are apparently popular with fourteen-year-old girls who wear thick black eye liner, cry a lot and consider themselves "alternative". What you can't turn off though, are the two things in the game that conspire to destroy it. First, there's the way in which if you stray off the track even slightly - if you cut a corner by the tiniest of margins - the game gives you a count of three to go back and do it properly. If you don't then you're dropped on the track at the place where you went wrong and forced to do it again. This can often become joypad smashingly infuriating. Stuck a wheel off the track whilst overtaking? GO BACK! Nudged off the track in mid air by an opponent? GO BACK! I understand why there needs to be a system in place so you can't cut corners, but I have never experienced one that's so unforgiving. In a game that's all about the freedom to do stupid things that you wouldn't dare do in real life, being told that you have to go back because you were off the track by an inch just doesn't make any sense. It breaks up the fun and that's the last thing anyone wants.

The second major problem is the scenery. Scattered around the track you'll find hay bales, tractor tyres and various other things, put there, in real life at least, for safety's sake. The reasoning is that it's better to fall forty foot into a hay bale than forty foot into the ground. However, what is a sensible precaution in real life becomes a massive headache in the game. Hit a bale and you will be flung, headfirst, over your handlebars. There's no give, no physics engine behind the crash or thinking that, maybe, driving into a soft collection of grass wouldn't be quite so fatal. When this starts to happen twice per race, profanities and violence are never far behind. Whilst these two problems start off as minor niggles, within an hour they're getting beyond a joke. It's such a shame, because they drag down what would have been a great game.

The multiplayer is cursed with the same faults and blessed with the same fun factor as the rest of the game. The modes are all pretty much identical to the ones in the single player game, save for the introduction of the sports section. Here, teams of two can face off against each other in either football or basketball, using their vehicles to steer the ball into the net. It's not brilliantly presented and the controls are sloppy, but it'll keep you and some mates entertained for a short while.

ATV: Offroad Fury 4 is a solid game. It has flaws - large, glaring flaws that should have been worked out before release - but it still manages to hold your attention. It's ugly, shallow, stupid fun. If you can find it for half price, then pick it up; it won't change your world, but it lets you pull off backflips on quads while wiggling your legs from side to side, which - and let's be honest - is something that everyone wants to try.

Reviewed by Harry Slater for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).