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Road Runner is a pursuit game which unfortunately has nothing to do with long-legged birds which go beep-beep.

You control a small grand prix type of car which you have to drive around a maze of barriers, avoiding rocks, and scoring points by driving through checkpoints, identified by flags. Hindering you in your task are three pursuit vehicles which delight in crashing into you, although you can thwart them by releasing smoke clouds from your exhaust. There is a glorious disregard for the laws of physics; you can go into instant reverse or make gut wrenching 90 degree turns, and of course, you have three lives before you lose your no claims bonus.

There is plenty of instruction text on the introductory screens, but no demonstration mode. At the start of the game you are given a choice of six levels, and the option of using joysticks or keyboard. However, I later discovered that the only way to change level or control option was to press ESCAPE which simply re-ran the program losing the high score table.

The screen presentation is very good. The screen is divided into two halves, the lower half is a birds-eye view of the maze, complete with cars, whilst the upper half is a radar screen, similar in concept to the Planetoid and Defender type games. Steering your car up or down moves it up and down the centre of the screen, but steering it left or right scrolls the screen sideways, again rather like the Defender games. Sound effects were no more than a dull buzzing, and crashes were most unspectacular.

I was unhappy with the controls. The keyboard options were A-Z for up-down, and DELETE-COPY for left-right. Maybe it is because I am left-handed, but I felt that these were the wrong way round, and often found myself going down when I wanted to go right. It would have been nice to be able to define my own keys. I tried it with joysticks, but preferred the keyboard, although this is a complaint against the joysticks rather than the Road runner program.

Overall, this is a fast, smoothly animated and well thought out arcade game, with plenty of scope for you to progress through the levels, but is let down by the packaging which surrounds the actual game action, that is, the lack of a display mode, the dull sound effects and crashes, the uninspiring highscore table, yet at less than eight pounds, it is still good value for money.