Obvious comedy aside, shit this game is good and damn does it look good. You would not imagine that a kart racer has thus far been above and away the prettiest thing I've run through this monitor, but I'm sorry Witcher 2, you sir are dethroned. The screenshots really can't do it justice.
The title of the game has this key little word that defines why it's so amazing to look at: Transformed. What does transformed mean here? It means, as the track goes, the vehicle you're driving in or the track beneath you can transform. It's way cooler than it sounds, usually - there's a little bug in the land/air to water transformation that crops up very rarely - but basically you go from driving, to hitting the water as a boat, to launching into the air as a jet or hovercraft or weird looking steam punk thing. The tracks change over the course of the race, either pushing you into different sections or entire sections explode, so you take off into the air.
On paper that sounds rather horrible, but on the most part the transitions are flawless. The game has an excellent sense of flow, blasting you past molten rivers, through dragon skeletons, over sinking aircraft carriers, through shinobi temples at autumn and just everything else you can think of. It is both a stunning homage to Sega games (though of course I wish they could have gotten rights to stuff like Herzog Zwei or used tracks from Phantasy Star) and wonderful to look at. This is probably the first game I can bring to mind where water not only looks good, but has its own feeling as a terrain that isn't just "go slow".Why do they put water in mmorpgs anyway? That's all it ever is - go slow. Great. Here, water is fun, though obviously the way a boat handles is pretty eager to fishtail. But then again, it's a boat. Boats do that. I am not good at driving a boat because I am not literally boat people. I've spent less time in a boat than I have in a plane in the real life.
