Kemco, Tantulus and Nintendo have teamed up to bring us Top Gear Rally for the Game Boy Advance. It's a rally racing game in true 3D, and while most games of this type seem to be slow and sluggish, TGR is quite the opposite, fast and smooth. It has a lot of impressive things going for it, with few shortcomings to speak of.

There are three major racing modes available to you. The Championship is the meat of the game, where you get new stages and cars by progressing through over ten locations, each with three stages. The Time Trial mode is what you'd expect from any racing game, except this one also has worldwide internet ranking via Kemco's website. Additionally, there is a practice track where you can get the feel for new cars you've unlocked or try to learn manual transmission, or just fool around in general. The other modes include Quick Race and 2-player, which round out the list.

As with most rally racing games, your job is to get from Point A to Point B as quickly as possible, passing up the seven other racers on the way. Your co-driver will call out the direction and severity of upcoming turns, as well as alert you to other conditions, like jumps, or warn you if you've been off the track for too long. The tracks have a variety of surfaces, including asphalt, dirt, mud, gravel, snow, and others. You'll need to tweak your car's settings before a stage to put on the proper tires for the conditions or change the gear ratio for higher top speeds, if desired. All the basic stuff you'd expect to see in a rally racer is in Top Gear Rally, and that's just fine for this game.

The game looks very impressive, mostly due to the fact that everything is 3D. Normally, this would cause a GBA game to look bad, but in this case, it works. Because of the design of the game, things can be done here that couldn't be done with other perspectives. Tracks go uphill and downhill at wild rates, blind corners occur at the tops of hills, and big jumps can make your car catch some serious air. There is also some good racing to be had, because more often than not, you're going to see three other cars on screen at the same time, trading paint with them as you go. There are some problems with hardware limitations, though. There's some pop-in of the backgrounds, but that's to be expected. A more serious gripe is that sometimes, the track surfaces can be a bit hard to distinguish compared to the non-track surfaces, making it hard to stay speedy on turns.

What's even more impressive about TGR is that it actually conveys a good sense of speed. It's not because the game fakes one, like with some 2D games that have objects coming forward quickly. When turns are coming at you left and right, and you need to whip the back end of your car around really fast, you'll do it, and it feels quite realistic for a handheld game. The first-person perspective(!) and getting airborne really drive home the fact that yes, you really are going 140+ miles an hour.

In rally racing, you're really racing the track, and you'll need good control over your vehicle to do that. Control actually varies depending on what type of surface you're racing on. You'll obviously have more traction on a paved road than you would a snow-covered one, and the game manages to show you the difference very well on the screen and through the D-Pad. Additionally, this isn't a game where you can just hit the gas and fly through the tracks. You'll need to brake before and slide around many corners before you finish a race. If you take a few hard lefts or hard rights for granted, you'll swing right off of the beaten path and into a road sign or light pole, destroying any chance you have at a stage win. You need to slow down to go faster, as the old racing saying goes.

Really, the only downfall to Top Gear is the sound. When all the processing power of the unit goes to a game's graphics, some of the sound is going to be sacrificed. Although the sound of tires sliding over mud is nice, there aren't many other effects worth mentioning. The sound of your co-driver barking out the same 10 sayings over and over again gets repetitive, and there's no background music at all, which would have helped considerably. Still, compared to the rest of the game, the sound does the job just fine, and will never get mind-numbingly annoying. In fact, you can change the engine sound your car makes my changing its exhaust system between stages, which is very nice on the ears.

Overall, Top Gear Rally is a very solid and enjoyable racing game for the Game Boy Advance. It's definitely in the top tier of GBA racers available today, and you know it's good if Nintendo asked Kemco if they could bring it to the system. If you like portable racing games, this is one title you must own, plain and simple.