(Note: Updated 9.8.17 after playing for about a week)Tracks: Fantastic. AntiGravity (AG) racing depends so heavily on the track design and these tracks really outdo any other AG game I've played (or any other racer, for that matter). They work well at the lower speeds, but once the game starts throwing you into higher class racing (II and up) things get truly amazing. Jumps are plentiful but not annoying (and they're real "uh oh" jumps too - nearly every jump has you flying across or through empty space, and the sense of vertigo during the air segments is dead center perfect), every corner can be navigated cleanly and at speed, and once you get farther up in the career mode, the tracks corkscrew, pivot hard in every possible direction, and generally do the best possible job that could be done of convincing you that you're controlling a frictionless AG hovercraft barrelling nearly out of control at 1000mph+. These tracks honestly make every Wipeout track since Wipeout XL/2097 look boring. The designers of Redout threw the "safe" playbook out the window - these tracks will freak you out, make you feel like you're almost totally out of control, and give you that exhilarating sense of speed and vertigo that's the whole reason you want to play an AG racer in the first place. And lastly...the kind of flat out annoying turn sequences in Wipeout HD/Pulse/Pure (Sebenco Climb/Chenghou Project, I'm looking at you) that were just irritating are nowhere to be found here. I read a review that mentioned "samey track design" as a flaw...but honestly I think the way they laid out the tracks is perfect. You get a handful of different tracks in each setting, and each one is identifiably unique and memorizable, but when you play Boss Mode (which strings all the tracks in a given location together in one long track) is when it really hits you just how good the tracks are.Sense of speed/Immersion/Vertigo: Amazing. Intense. If you don't want to bother picking up your controller to play a racing game unless it induces at least faint nausea (and that would be me) then this is perfect. The way the ships control is interesting - it's pretty much 90% Wipeout and 10% something else (I'm guessing more realistic physics and quadcopter type controls) but if you set the control scheme to Wipeout...er I mean Classic, then it will take you maybe one or two races before it feels completely familiar. Overall it definitely feels a little "zippier" as opposed to "drifty" (Wipeout's AG feel was a little more slide-y when you used the airbrakes as opposed to the almost mathematically fastidious "stop/start" type of feel you get when you overuse the airbrakes here) but it's easy to get used to and is just as much fun. And the tracks go by FAST. I will admit that I was skeptical "Race faster than ever!" and during the Class I races I was going "this is kinda slow..." but by the time you get to the tail end of the Class II tracks...it's almost on a par with Phantom (the fastest racing class in Wipeout) velocities. You can tell they really went to a lot of effort to build the game around the sense of speed, and it shows.Hardcore Factor/Difficulty/Learning Curve: AG racing can be tricky and challenging. It's not the same trying to control a hovercraft with zero ground friction doing 1000+ mph as it is to try to control a simulated car or motorcycle (and for my money, it's WAY more entertaining - I have to sit in my car for two hours a day - why would I want to waste my gaming time basically repeating the experience?) I have to applaud the way they set this up. The difficulty curve is basically perfectly planned - someone who's never played one of these before could pick this up and get a hang for it without much difficulty. Yet an old school hardcore AG racing freak like me gets to the good stuff - the tracks that are eye-bleeding fast that challenge you to try them again and again until you get gold on every one - pretty quickly. That being said, hats off to 34BigThings for really nailing the hardcore aspect in the later speed classes. I mastered every track in Wipeout HD and actually got bored and eventually quit playing because the game just wouldn't go fast enough - even in Phantom class - to keep challenging me. I can tell that won't be a problem here.Graphics: I was initially a little worried when I read the words "low-polygon art style" (because I thought it meant "crappy graphics we didn't put much time into") but honestly, the graphics look freaking amazing. They fit the AG futuristic racing visual style you'd expect and really do multiply the immersion factor, making you feel like you're actually racing in the future. At higher speeds, the tracks whip past in a truly mesmerizing type of kaleidoscopic rollercoaster effect. Many of the tracks have corkscrew or vertical up/down segments, and the parts where the tracks are transparent and they throw you into loops and barrels just look fantastic.Ships: I have only played with a few classes (and honestly I'm unsure why you'd choose anything other than the fastest ship class with the best turning and then just learn how not to eat wall sufficiently to win, but then again I always went straight for Piranha/AG Systems/Icaras) but the balance between the different ship types seems decent. It would be a great add if they added the option to create your own custom ship (assigning points to whichever attributes you wanted). The upgrading system for the ships (it's separate from the PowerUps, look for it on the team selection menu) is decent. Considering this is the first AG racer I've played where you can even tweak the ships at all, definitely an improvement.Power-ups/Combat: Here's one of the only areas the title falls short in. There are no true "weapons" in the Wipeout sense (the closest you get is an EMP blast that drains the energy of the racers around you...weak! I want to see them blasted off the track!). There's two Power Up classes - Passive (always on) and Active (requires the use of the same energy pool that you use to power your turbo boosts). I suppose depending on your personal preference you might get more out of the power up system than I do, but despite trying out all of them, I basically settled on a Passive one that makes me go faster (which seems like the only real obvious choice anyway - I mean...if nobody can catch you, why does anything else matter?) and an Active that lets me trade in energy to replenish shields (since the game does allow sliding against walls to catch a slight speed boost, and that drains shields). Yes, I would have liked to see true weapons combat in this game, but honestly the track design, the way the controls and physics respond, sense of immersion, etc, are so fantastic and they do such a good job of making the pure experience of racing a piloting skill thing that not having real weapons doesn't really count against the overall experience.Music: I was so under-impressed by the music that I turned it off three songs into my first play session, and according to what I've read the music is supposed to get better (or faster?) the faster you go, which I haven't tried yet, so, there's that. Load up Spotify on your PS4 and find some filthy darkstep, neurofunk, industrial, hardstyle, goa, etc, you like, turn off the game music (but do keep the sound effects on! they're pretty cool), and throw down with a custom mix instead. It increased my enjoyment of the game about 200%.AI: Enemy AI functions basically as it should. It's tough to beat but not impossible.Conclusion/Wrapup: If you like racing games at all (especially AG racing games), going fast, or you truly enjoy being immersed into hyper-stylized futuristic settings, pick this game up. Forty bucks for a game with this much content is literally unheard of these days - if this got released by a big name developer/publisher, you'd be lucky if you got more than 8 tracks on the disc (let alone 25+) and you'd probably be paying a lot more than $40 for it. Plus that, it's already been out on PC for nearly a year, so you're not getting some game a publisher rushed to ship to hit a date that still needs another 2 months of QA and patches to be playable, you're getting a truly polished, slick, and (in my opinion) nearly perfect racing game. You can tell these developers truly love AG racing. Support them so they can make another one!I'm personally forever grateful to 505 Games and 34BigThings for putting this out and ending the long-standing console AG winter (and no I'm not associated with either).Back to racing!