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It's 2100 AD and the world has gone to hell. Civilization has collapsed to the point where the pinnacle of sporting entertainment is a ritualized form of gang warfare, a 'free-for-all ball-throwing brawl'. Disembowelments and decapitations are applauded - in a society gone mad, violence is the only solution. Stuart Wynne investigates the ultimate blood sport!

This ten-men-a-side futuresport, with goals at either end, may suggest real sports like football or ice hockey, but it uses the freedom of computer games to pack in a great many special features - plus incredible violence.

Each match consists of two games - home and away presumably, although unlike the first Speedball all the pitches are identical. Games are played over two halves, each lasting ninety seconds, with teams swapping ends at half-time. You always control your team member closest the ball. If you have the ball you can throw it in whichever of the eight directions you're facing, holding down fire to select the height at which it's thrown. If you don't have the ball you might try to catch it: pressing fire makes you leap up in the air for high balls, or by pressing fire and a direction you can make a sliding tackle. To successfully floor your opponent, you need good timing and speed, while good stats help.

But unlike the original game it's not simply a case of scoring goals - points can be earned in a wide variety of ways. This makes for a much more sophisticated game than either footy or Speedball 1. As you pass the ball around your players, there's a wide variety of special features to go for, it's not just a relentless attack on the goal. On the whole this works very well, but there are flaws.

The importance of the Score Multiplier means whole matches can be passed in boring, repetitive brawls besides the Multiplier, with each team refusing to go for goal until the Multiplier is either off or turned to their advantage. The Multipler also increases the effectiveness of the Electroball - on the Amiga it became absolutely lethal, lasting ages and able to tackle lots of players. Here, the Electroball isn't so effective to begin with, and its Multiplier improvement isn't so diabolical. The flaw remains, but is a great deal less serious thankfully.

A somewhat less sophisticated dimension to the game are tokens which appear randomly on the pitch, each has its own design signifying what effect it will have. Collect the right one and you can briefly freeze opposing players, reverse your opposing players, reverse your opponent's joystick control, teleport the ball to one of your attacking players, etc. These tokens are initially a little confusing, but you soon learn to recognize the one that zaps all the surrounding enemy players, knocking them off their feet!

All these various elements need to be mastered if you're to really succeed with this game, which besides one or two-player matches (best of one, three or five matches) has a Knockout tournament (where you keep playing until you lose), a 14-week League (consisting of two divisions, each with eight teams) and a four-round knockout Cup. Thankfully, the game can be saved after each match, but there's no option for a multi-player league if friends want to join in.

The long-term contests are especially interesting because they give the chance to really develop a team. Money collected during the matches can be spent to tailor the team to your playing tactics, plus there's a trade option where you can get rid of poor players in favour of new ones (if you can afford the transfer fees!). In fact, you can turn off participation in matches, letting your team get on with it while you concentrate on management (although you still have to watch the matches in full).

A somewhat more serious flaw lies with the graphics. Their relative lack of detail and smallness makes for an even faster game than the Amiga, the pitch feels massive and there's always lots of players whizzing around. However, the tiny icon which indicates who's got the ball can, in hectic scrums, be a bit too hard to spot, leading to irritating moments of confusion. The speed also makes goalkeeping a bit problematic; if you beat the defence then the goalkeeper is likely to be too confused to provide much challenge.

As one-time Amiga Speedball 2 addicts, of course, we understand all the plus and minus points of the game much more than we would if it were completely new. From that perspective it's amazing how gameplay has not only been so well recreated, with all the features crammed in, but it's also been improved and speeded up.

Although we now see the odd flaw in Speedball 2, this is an astounding conversion, a great game in its own right and one of the best sports sims around. Rapid-fire action and a good management element make this highly recommended.

What a brilliant conversion that is. Not only have all the Amiga's features been included, but incredibly they've been crammed into a single load. Even better, one of the main faults of the Amiga game has been corrected. In that version, the hotball was overpowerful - once you'd got it you were virtually unstoppable, especially if its power was doubled with the Score Multiplier.

In the C64 game it can only be used to tackle one opponent before running out, so it ceases to be so important. Thus other pitch features, such as stars and bounce domes, get increased attention, making for more varied matches.

Another nice new touch is the different colours for the league teams.

1. A standard "goal" earns a neat 10 points, but there's lots of other ways of getting points and multiplying their value too. Two points can be earned by hitting one of the two "Bounce Domes" or "Point Stars" - five per team, and if you get them all there's a ten point bonus.

The most important special feature is undoubtedly the "Score Multiplier": fire a ball up one of these two steel loops to increase the value of each point you score by 50%. Hit the Multiplier again and scoring is increased 100%, hitting a Star now gets you four points!

This can be turned around by the other player hitting the Multiplier, two hits returning it to normal with a further two hits giving him (or her) 100% improved point-scoring.

Other special features include four "Warp Gates", which teleport the ball between them, and "Electrobounces". These electrify the ball so it knocks over the next enemy player it hits, perfect for getting past the goalie (or clocking up the Multiplier).

Each player has eight individual attributes, from aggression to intelligence to attacking power. At the start of each game, you can spend any money you've collected off the pitch on raising individual player attributes.

If you've got lots of cash you improve the team's attributes as a whole, or in groups; attack, defence, midfield. One important attribute is stamina: this is reduced by hits and if it falls to zero, the player is stretchered off, a substitution is made and the other team gets ten points!

Presentation 84%
Intro load sets scene with reasonable static screens, nice revolving '2' and scrolling text. Pressing Fire loads in the game proper which is a single load. Nevertheless, there's some nice static screens for when you win or lose matches. Good manual and humorous match programme.

Graphics 76%
Simplistic but fast sprites, and the plain backdrops scroll very smoothly.

Sound 78%
Good intro tune, but basic in-game spot FX.

Hookability 91%
Ultra-violence and the basic simplicity of just scoring goals (to begin with), make this instantly addictive.

Lastability 90%
Comprehensive League, Cup and Knockout options with save/load, team enhancement and player trading add up to a great long-term challenge.

Overall 90%
A stunning conversion, superior in some ways to the Amiga game, and overall one of the most playable one- or two-player games about.