The great British buying public, of which this reviewer is a paid-up member (with the credit card bill to prove it) has, for the past few years, chosen to bestow the honour of Christmas Number One on EA's underground arcade racing Need For Speed series.

And much like the X-Factor / Pop Idol / other crap reality TV show winner which inevitably tops the music charts around Yuletide, Need For Speed isn't the best out there, but it always seems to click with the buying public.

This version will, too. Again, it's being very well marketed, it's packaged with plenty of gloss and there's actually a perfectly enjoyable game at the heart of it. Clearly the reality TV show analogy crumbles right there.

The basics are this: thanks to some hokum cut scenes and a little bit of racing right at the start, you find yourself with nothing more than a competent set of wheels, with your old crew nowhere to be seen. That's a problem when you're an underground racer, taking on various challenges, races, speed camera trials and suchlike across the streets of a vibrant, fully working city. And so the challenge begins to build up your reputation, take down the bosses of other crews and build up your vehicle into a road beast to be feared.

Unlike the last time we met NFS, though, there's no league table to work your way up or anything like that. The game instead divides the world into territories, and you win over these areas by winning a good chunk of the race challenges within them. Get enough of them and the territory will fly under the banner of your crew. The challenge then is to hold onto the territories you've won, while expanding your way across the city to win the rest of them. It's quite a test and it will keep you busy for some time.

Mixing up the racing side of things is the introduction of wingmen. The idea here is that you have a team, from whom you can deploy a couple of drivers in races. Wingmen have one of three skills. There are blockers, who you can activate to try to stop the traffic behind from getting near you. Drafters, meanwhile, let you sit in their slipstream to get an extra speed boost. And then there's the trusty scout, who will also look ahead to try to find the best shortcuts. You can't use all of the wingmen until you've built up the relevant on-screen gauge enough, but when you can - at least in the early races - they prove to be a useful addition.

The race challenges themselves vary from checkpoint-style runs over a course, through to straight races, a challenge whereby you must have the fastest cumulative speed through a series of speed cameras, and the return of drifting. The latter sees you in a hyper-sensitive car trying to build up the best drifts over a devilishly twisted course.

We weren't too sold on drifts, but we were on the canyon races, where the aim is to hold a lead over the car behind for the first half, before you switch over and try to overtake the car in front for the second. These are two-vehicle challenges across extremely tight and difficult canyon courses, and are a good test of your NFS skills.

In spite of the paragraphs where we've expended on what's changed, the ultimate truth is that not much has. The game certainly feels the same, in spite of some work to differentiate the vehicle classes within it, and we still managed to get our best moments out of it via the crazy and desperately enjoyable police chases you can engage in (as we did last year). But it is fun, and it would be unfair to write it off.

On the PC, at least, arcade racing games are at a premium at the best of times, meaning OutRun Coast2Coast is your best alternative this year. However, unless the Burnout games ever make it to the format, then Need For Speed will, reliably and unsurprisingly, satisfy PC gamers' arcade racing desires. Because that's pretty much what's happened this year. Again.