Suffice it to say, the visuals in Whirl Tour are a tad underwhelming, but they could be much worse. Nonetheless, the cartoon-style level design and character artwork seems to flow together nicely, but with a noticeable lack of detail and low poly-count. The graphics really don't utilize the PS2's hardware as much as one would expect, not by a long shot.

SFX and music are of an even lesser quality... all terrains have the same dull rolling sound whether you are on a concrete or wooden surface, and the scraping sounds for grinds do not depend on the surface, either. Still worse is the music! I'm not critical about having popular bands by any means, but from the sound of it, Vivendi's choice pool couldn't have been much further than their back yard.

Crave Entertainment's try at the extreme sports genre is another unique build upon the tried-and-true style first showcased by Tony Hawk's Pro Skater. Every aspect of this game seems dated, though. The attempts to merge extreme sports with adventure are welcome, but the characters and levels are so dry and the same art appears over and over again that it all just comes across as unprofessional.

Whirl Tour's intro shows a punk band on stage that is undoubtedly popular judging from the reactions by the crowd. Over about ten seconds each of these band members are unfortunately sucked through a warp by some antagonist we haven't yet seen or heard of (beyond their will, even!). Alas, the fate of these band members is on the shoulders of Wasa B., who follows the last of them into the warp with what we hope is a weapon or at least a search warrant. It is indeed a scooter. ''A lost party of six... A search party of one.''

So each level holds a band member captive somewhere. There are similar goals in every stage such as defeating the boss and surpassing the high score before the time limit and collecting the five tokens (many of which scream Tony Hawk's Pro Skater). It isn't entirely obvious how one goes about accomplishing some of these goals, however. The interface has the time and points earned, and one hell of a lame skull-shaped health meter.

Whirl Tour undoubtedly plays very similar to that other game I keep repeating as well, keeping the exact camera system and exact same moves and buttons. Even the names of the moves are the same. The only real differences between the two are that A) you're on a scooter now, and B) this time it's boring.

Getting a high score is very easy to pull off if you know how to get some speed and grind. This is because Newton's first law of motion (objects continue moving unless acted upon my an outside force blah blah..) doesn't apply, so if you can keep your balance then you can grind all the way around the level and not lose any speed. As this game seems to be geared toward a younger audience, the difficulty is also lowered a couple of notches.

The graphics engine in Whirl Tour can be truly unfortunate at times; bad anti-aliasing and clipping seems to be a recurring problem, and during cut scenes the player goes limp riding his scooter into the background (not really a big deal but geez...).

Whirl Tour is an okay, clean addition to the extreme sports genre. Hardcore gamers needn't even give the game a go; there are other more complete games of the same type that do it sore injustice. On the other hand, the clean music and lack of vulgarity and blood make this a good recommendation for children.