HardCore Heat offers a mix of on- and off-road racing. Most of the tracks are a little bit of each. You can zoom down the freeway and then plow through sand dunes on your way to the finish line. The game's eight cars are divided into two categories. Dune buggies and big trucks. The big trucks go faster, of course, and the dune buggies corner a little better. The vehicles all had stats detailing their horsepower, torque, and weight. Presumably these affected the gameplay somehow, but I never could figure it out beyond big trucks go fast, little dune buggies go around corners better. Yep, pretty basic. You can re-tune various aspects of your car to make it excel in different areas. For example, you could re-tune your big truck to go slower but accelerate faster like a buggy. Or you could re-tune your buggy and make it go faster like a big truck, but it’ll accelerate slower.

The graphics on HardCore Heat are moderately neato. They’re a cut above what you can find on other systems, but they’re nothing special on the Dreamcast. Japan is a pretty cool looking race track and the lightning storm in France is pretty sweet, and these combine for the games graphical highlights. The vehicles themselves are smooth and detailed very well, and you can even see the driver in the front seat. Unfortunately that’s about all of the complimentary things I can think of.

Control on a driving game is the single most important element, and it’s the first area Hardcore Heat falls flat on its face. The control is just bad, and fish tailing is a way of life you just have to get used to in order to play this game. I’ve been driving for a while now and when I go to make a routine right hand turn I hardly ever slip into a nine hundred and twenty degree spin and end up gunning it in the wrong direction. In HardCore Heat, you will. Learning to use the hand break helps, but not enough and it still doesn’t have the consistency or the effectiveness to make the control useable. The graphics are burdened even further by the weak physics engine. Cars run into each other and generally slow each other down, but they don’t react to each other’s momentum in any other way. Flipping your car is possible, but it won’t slow you down much. You’ll land on your wheels going only a little slower than before the flip. Brushing against a guard rail slows you way down when it looks like you should have gotten by with a little scraped paint. If it’s a close race and you have to choose between scraping the wall or flipping your car, flip the car every time. There’s a hairpin u-turn on one of the tracks where making the turn without incident is pretty much impossible, but you can slam down the gas and do ninety in a head on with the wall. You’ll catch a sweet bounce around the corner as you ricochet off the wall and be off on your merry way. It’s mildly amusing, but it’s not all that much fun.

This game has three difficulty levels. Normal, hard, and expert. In normal mode you have four races, in hard you do those four races plus one more. In expert mode you do those races plus one more. Some of the duplicated tracks will have different weather or the races take place at a different time of day, but that’s it. Six tracks. Huh? What? Yep that’s right, six bloody tracks. What’s up with that? That’s like eight bucks per track and the rest is just reruns. I have Pole Position II on my Atari and it has four tracks. I think we can do a little better. This game can be completed in four or five hours and it only takes that long because the control is so horrendous.

HardCore Heat does offer one innovative feature in the game. You can create and teach an AI to drive like you by saving an AI file on your VMU. It watches you race for a while and eventually emulates your driving style. You can then take your AI persona and race against it or see how it stacks up to other people’s AI. The feature works moderately well, but it takes quite a while to teach the AI to drive with any accuracy. If you have the patience to overlook the game's other flaws and want to keep driving on the same tracks over and over then enjoy. Otherwise you’ll probably find that it’s an interesting feature but it gets drowned out in the sea of inadequacies.

If you can’t wait to see what Sega Rally 2 has to offer later this fall, and absolutely have to partake in some off-road action, then rent first. A weekend of casual play will take you through the game a few times and you won’t want to come back for more.