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For a marriage of two "sure things" you'll never get a better bride and groom than a car chase in a post-apocalyptic landscape. Mad Max sealed the future over ten years ago and it's been pretty much gospel ever since. Badlands is Grand Prix Mad Max watched from a vulture's-eye view.

Or should that be Super Sprint on acid? Domark's latest racetrack coin-op conversion is programmed by the same gents at Teque and it shows - the aerial view, the bridges you scoot over and under - but now that civilisation is 50 years past its sell-by date the potential for anarchic tomfoolery is limitless.

What we've got here are eight courses built on a barren plot called the Badlands (oil refineries, prisons, volcanoes). Rubble litters the track, as do fallen power lines and oil slicks, and grates in the walls slide open and shut, tempting you to test your metal and slip through them before they lock their jaws on your automotive trunk.

Oh yes, and you'd better not forget your two driving opponents, of course: even as we speak, they have their on-board missiles homed in on your exhaust pipe and are just about to pull the trigger.

The name of the game is to win each two-lap race in the meanest possible manner and pick up any spanners you see lying about the track. In this way, you progress to the next contest and get to pop into "le shop" where you can stock up on armaments (to shoot back with), wheels, shields, you name it. Some pretty substantial artillery can be also found if you blast away merrily at the scenery (although you probably knew that already).

The tracks get progressively harder (of course), you can play against your chum (of course) and we've rather kindly been given two methods of joystick control (whoopee-doo).

How good is it? Well, let's take a look at the board, Miss Ford.

This type of game doesn't lend itself to amazing FX innovation, so it would be easy to knock Domark for being primitive. But what they've done they've done well. Though the sprites are pretty small, the overhead view makes for some nice "Matchbox car" graphics, the courses are just the right size and your car grips and glides its way round corners pretty realistically. Oh, and the sound effects do their job too.

I much prefer looking down on a track to sitting behind some steering wheel, somersaulting towards some ubiquitous mountain range that never greets me - it's the difference between a 2D game and a 3D one Badlands may not be trying to be real, but because of this it's far less constricted in game terms. You know how far through the race you are what position you're in and exactly what you need to do to win. A few more tracks would be nice, and the difficulty level does whizz up a bit disproportionately when you get into it, but I'm a bit partial to Scalextric with knobs on and this'll do me fine.