Import Tuner Challenge

This was a game I bought during my period of buying games that looked easy without looking at how long they would take to complete or if they were enjoyable. Essentially this boils down to Import Tuner Challenge being hugely repetitive and taking in excess of 20 hours to complete. It will feel a lot longer than this though.

Import Tuner Challenge has some kind of story where you turn up on ‘the Metro’ with the goal of becoming the ultimate street racer. It’s not really explained why but I suppose it’s something to do. You will have to race dudes and upgrade your cars until you have the ultimate showdown with King Speed. That’s pretty much it in terms of the story.

In terms of the gameplay, as I’ve mentioned above, its massively repetitive. You have to race dudes on a very linear circuit in battle races where you have to get ahead of them and stay ahead of them until their hypothetical health bar deteriorates. Once you’ve done this, you will get some money either towards a new car or upgrading your current one. You need to do this is excess of 300 times across the game and that doesn’t include races you lose.

Aside from battle races, you will also have to do a few traditional style point-to-point races. These tend to be longer than battle races but sometimes easier as once you get in front, you just have to defend your position the whole way. This won’t work in battle races as you actually have to put some distance between you and the opposition.

Aside from racing, you will have to buy new parts for your car to improve its performance. This is necessary to win all races after the first three but it doesn’t require anything special, you just need to buy parts. There is further customisation available but this isn’t necessary to complete the game but may make life easier if you know what you are doing; which I don’t.

Graphically, it hasn’t aged well at all. It’s an arcade racer that now looks dated and it even looks and feels dated compared to Forza Motorsport 2. Musically, it’s unapologetically Japanese. There’s noting wrong with this but I did get bored of the dated J-Pop after about 20 minutes.

Achievements - 1,000 Points – 27 Achievements

To get all of the achievements you will need to do three things. The first is complete quest mode and this is where the majority of time will be spent. I used a guide to try and reduce the amount of time I had to play the game, although in all honesty, I actually had to look up how to start a race as I must have missed it during the intro.

Anyway, this was kind of double-edged as the guide I used had me smashing my head against a brick wall during the middle part of the game. What it essentially boils down to is getting the Nissan Skyline and fully upgrading it. Once you’ve done this, 95% of quest mode becomes a non-event. It’s only when you get to the end game that the fun begins. You have to race these Wanderer guys of which there are 66 of them. Some of these guys will only race against specific cars and they all have a set of rules you need to obey before they will race you. This adds an element of reading that you would need to do to try and figure out how to make the Wanderers appear – just to add further to the repetition.

Once quest mode is finished, you need to complete all the time trials within a set time. The longest two involve having to race around the whole Metro and the target time is 16 minutes and 30 seconds – a long time for a time trail. Once again though, the fully upgraded Skyline makes these a formality.

That just leaves…

Multiplayer

Xbox Live races can be started with just two players which is a relief. You need to win 100 races online to bag the remaining 4 achievements. As the online is dead, this is now another boring repetitive task to add to the list.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Despite all the mean things I’ve said, Import Tuner Challenge wasn’t all bad and did provide some fun for the first few hours of gameplay. It’s definitely a unique racing experience and definitely not one I’ve seen before. It hasn’t enamoured me to the arcade racing genre though and I’m firmly continuing on my quest to complete all my racing games and never buying another one. Well. Unless they are free with Games with Gold.