This will be a short review on the demo for the Leadfoot Racing Game. Let me start off by saying that anyone who has played Dirt Track racing and DTR Sprint Cars this game will feel very similar to you since it seems to use the same old game and physics engine, so you won't have to adjust much. I wish I could say my experiences with the demo were good, but I cannot say that. The install process went without a problem and when you click on the shortcut on the desktop it brings up a graphics driver selection screen ranging from Auto detect, Glide, Banshee, D3D, and software modes. Since I have a V3 2000 I use Glide and I get tot he main menu that lets you choose single race, multiplayer, options, high scores and replays. Lets talk about the options menu first, it lets you do some limited video changes with screen resolution, device, and a few graphic options that you can increase or decrease to try to improve in game performance and appearance, I was a amazed at the limited number of graphic options you could turn off and on the try and improve FPS and some they don't allow you to turn off at all. The Input (Game controller) device section was very straight forward and easy to set up everything you need from calibrating and setting up the controller is right there and is very easy to see, I wish more games were as easy to setup a wheel for and it has a box down at the bottom for you to turn force Feedback on and off with. The audio options are even worse than the Video options very few to adjust to help the game run better, you get to adjust on speakers, cd volume, the crowd, sound Fx and interface sound by slider bars and nothing else. The next section was Game play section here you can turn on or off cockpit jitter, tire wear, auto reverse, set the handling difficulty, turn damage on or off and how harsh the damage will be, as well as automatic or manual transmission (locked on auto in demo).

Now after looking at all this it was time to hit the track and check this thing out. I click on single race, and then quick race since that's all you can run in the demo. The after that you get to the screen where you can choose one of two tracks and number of laps which is locked at 5 for the demo, and the amount of ai ranging from 1-15 and the ai difficulty. Then I click next to get to even another screen where you choose what vehicle you want which is either a 4x4 truck or a what I call a dune buggy, you are allowed to choose what car number you want and to type in your name. The vehicle skin is locked for each vehicle and at the bottom you get a brief description of the horsepower each one has and its top speed and what class it belongs to. I see no garage then wait a second what�s this at the bottom between the race and back buttons ah its tune. I start getting happy, but it didn't last long once I got in the garage. It lets you enter three different parts of the vehicle, which are Tires, Suspension and Driver train. Let's talk about the tires section first it has settings for Tire psi, toe in, brake strength, wheel size, camber, wheel lock and the groove of the tire, at the bottom it has a little arrow to each tire instead of having them all right in front of you like other racing games for you to view at the same time. The next section is Suspension, which is very limited with bump and rebound dampening and spring strength. It gives you settings for each tire all on one screen for Bump dampening, and then rebound dampening and the spring strength, which brings up the question why couldn't they do this with the tire section. The next section Drive train is even more limited with settings just for what type transmission automatic or manual transmission. Wait wasn't this setting already done under the Game play menu? Anyway the only other thing in this menu is Drive Ratio, which is locked at 6.00. I was very disappointed in not being able to adjust on vehicle in the garage in the demo, that's right all you can do is look around and then jump in and drive.

After looking around in the garage for a while it was time to check out the racing. I am no means a expert in truck racing physics, but I seriously doubt the real drivers of this sport keep the gas floored around hairpin turns on a dirt track or land half way into a turn after a jump and still be able to make the turn, but I could be wrong. The dune buggies seem to slide just as much as the trucks even though they have way less horsepower, this could be because of the lighter weight, but I still don't feel they should slide as much as the trucks do. The physics are very dumped down it seems where you can beat the hell out of the vehicles and still continue until you blow the motor up by hitting the front-end into objects to much, besides this the damage model seems to be graphical only. As for the actual game play I can see where this can be fun just to

Unwind from long hours of tweaking in other racing Sims but I couldn't get any fun out of it because I couldn't get over 10 fps with 1 ai on the track with me. The game lags really bad especially in turns and I don't see why since it's not as graphically intense as other racing Sims. I didn't try out the multiplayer part of the demo because of this reason. I am running the game on a Athlon 500 with 256 megs of ram and a V3 2000 video card and I would think this should be enough power to run this game, since I can get better fps in Nascar racing 4 with full detail graphics and 25 Ai cars, maybe the full version will be better in this area and the other areas

My conclusion is even though it has some faults if you have the machine to run the demo download it and give it a try you will like it, it's a nice fresh release from the normal racing Sims. Even though the read me says a P3 300 is recommended, I recommend a P3 600 with a geforce 2 card at least. With the full version already out and only costing $19.99 it's worth picking up for some good arcade racing fun despite the Demo's problems.