After picking your name and sex, you'll design a uniform for your jockeys, pick a difficulty (easy makes the horses better, makes it easier to hit Revolution Mode during races, and doesn't let horses suffer from lack of motivation; hard means the horses are weaker, don't grow as fast and Revolution Mode is harder to do) and set about exploring the game's three different modes.

The first, Title Collection, is more or less an extended version of the Free and Sim Modes, but this is GR's career mode, essentially, and the horse you pick here will grow, mature and develop as you ride through the simulated 2 years and seven months that you're afforded for a season. There is a catch, though: horses cost points to ride, so you'll have to balance your winnings against keeping a solid stable.

Once you've picked your horse, you'll choose the next five races for it, either by selecting from a handful of venues or by looking at a timeline of all available courses (though these are much harder races), as the weeks go on, your choices expand, but there's a good chance that you won't qualify for all races. With five races picked, it's time to head into each one. Even before they start, you can drop whatever remaining points you have on a single horse to win (take first), place (first or second) or show (top three), or you can get crazy and name quinellas (first and second place finishers without saying which will take each spot), exactas (first and second, specifying which horse finishes in which place) or trifectas (the top three, with the exact finishing order).

The races progress the same way they do in all the other modes, though the points here are obviously more important, so running a clean race is almost as key as finishing in first (which you still obviously want to do). How you race and place directly affects your horse's stats, gifting them with minor or major dips and spikes in the stat numbers. If you're not happy with a result, you can always retry for 1000 points, but you'll still carry the stat dings and bonuses with you, so it's purely for placing.

Since it's no fun to race with other people's horses, you can make your own in the Gallop Station. The process is fairly simple; start by choosing a broodmare or a stud (both of which will cost you cash). Before picking out a horse, you can look through four generations of their pedigree, with handy icons that show what kind of special abilities or disabilities the foal might gain from mom and dad. With both parents set, you simply let nature take its course, and you're up one new horse. You can name it, outfit the boy or girl with the equipment we discussed earlier and take a look at the horse's stats. You can hold up to 100 horses in your stable, and dismiss any that you don't like, but once they're gone, they're gone.

The third option, Field of Legend, wasn't unlocked with our playtime, but if we do manage to unlock it, we'll make sure we report back with an update.

Even with all these options, the core of the game is still horse racing, and (at least on easy difficulty -- yes, we're wimps) it's an intoxicating mix of strategy and adaptive reaction. Learning exactly how each horse responds to terrain, to being in a pack, to how they're driven at different parts of the track, and watching them grow in their abilities as they progress through a season can be incredibly addictive.

Not only that, but factoring in how each horse likes to race (if they break early, if they're weak in the stretch, etc.) completely changes how you'll race on a given track. Building up a stable of horses that can run well on short tracks, long ones, that handle packs well, that are solid enough to bet on -- or against -- is deep enough that you're rewarded for that time spent.

We've really only started digging into the game, and if we uncover something more, we'll be sure to report back with the findings.