Arcade racing games have been few and far between during this console generation, which makes Gravel’s straightforward approach feel almost like a throwback. On its surface, Milestone’s latest appears to toe the line between being an authentic simulation of off-road racing, and a rough-and-tumble arcade experience. There are myriad driver assists that let you tune the difficulty to your liking, and the option to tweak each vehicle’s ride height, differentials, and so on, gives you some degree of performance-based customisation. Yet the effect these options have on Gravel’s driving model are negligible at best. This is an unpretentious arcade racer that’s incredibly easy to pick up and play, but this simplicity also contributes to a lack of heart-pounding excitement.

Gravel’s single player career mode, dubbed “Off-road masters”, has you globetrotting between events that mix up different race types and disciplines, with each one loosely connected by the concept of a Gravel TV show. There’s not much of substance to this structure beyond the inclusion of an unenthusiastic commentator imparting a few tired lines before and after every race, and a few quasi boss fights that bookend each block of episodes. The latter do at least come locked and loaded with some corny FMV introductions, where fictional racing drivers strike poses in what can only be described as a flaming hellscape. For as amusing as I often found these brief interludes, the mano-e-mano races that follow suffer from the same prevalent problem Gravel does as a whole: they’re just kind of boring.