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This phenomenally fantastic, futuristic road-race game, previously only available to Atari and Commodore owners, is now out on the humble Amstrad. The idea of the game is to drive your car across alien-looking landscapes. 3D objects block your path like floating prisms hanging over the road and zig-zagging, bouncing balls shoot down the road towards you. All this is supplemented with enemy aircraft dropping sinister glowing pillars in your way.

The road is strictly in the standard mould with the 3D, dead flat road stretching away in front of you to a horizon replete with the 'traditional' mountains. Alongside the road, trees appear occassionally looms up on the horizon and you flash towards it. This heralds the next stage of the run.

The game proceeds section by section with a time limit on each run, any time left over from one section is carried over to the next. The original game had no score - it's not whether you win or lose, but how you play the game - but, like the Commodore 64 version, the Amstrad variant has a score related to time and distance.

There are three different tracks in the game. Named England, Australia and America. These three tracks bear litte resemblance to their adopted countries (mountains in England?) and are just different tracks with different colour schemes. Each one is about five sections long - so you should spend a lot of time with this game.

The Amstrad implementation has taken a very long time. The original game was written around the very special processing abilities of the Commodore and Atari video chips, along with the relative high speed of the 6502 processor comparedto the Z80 processor in the Amstrad. The result is a lot better than it could have been. The road moves very quickly, but the movement of various objects can be a bit slow and jerky, though this only really shows up when approaching or leaving a tunnel.

The Amstrad's good colour ability is used to its full effect and the whole thing looks very attractive.

Whilst you are thrashing around all these roads there is some really incredible music playing away in the background. I admit that it isn't as good as the Commodore 64 and the Atari versions, due to the limitations of the Amstrad's fairly crude sound system, but it is still excellent - real scene setting stuff...

On the whole, this is an extremely enjoyable game that is one of the few that I will keep coming back to over the next year. Play it and believe it!