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Highway Fighter boasts the tagline "An underground racing game". What that means is anyone's guess... because you view all of the action of this game from way overhead - as if you're in a helicopter keeping pace with the car below you as it rockets through deserts, cities and beaches! Underground? I don't think so.

What we have here is a souped-up "avoid-the-other-cars-on-the-endless-road" game. If you were around in the Eighties, you may well have typed in a similar sort of game from one of the books of BASIC programs for the early 8-bit machines. They were all typically the same: a vertically scrolling road peppered with other vehicles - some stationary, some not - with the aim to chug along, avoiding the sides of the road itself and the hazards on it, whilst picking up cans of fuel. That's precisely what you do here too.

Of course, we've come quite a long way since the 1980s and Highway Fighter, mercifully, doesn't silently scroll in "8x8 CHR$ chunks" or return you to a blank screen with a flashing cursor when you run out of fuel. No, no, no, Highway Fighter is nothing if not a smooth-scroller, and there's a myriad of options available to suit whatever MSX2 computer configuration you're playing it on. 60Hz/50Hz Monitor, 11000 or 16 colours and even the choice of three different sound cards are all available from the introductory screen before the game starts.

Once it does start, though, there's no going back. Literally. You can accelerate, you can put on the brakes, but you can't reverse. The scroll moves from top to bottom, keeping your car squarely in the bottom sixth of the screen and its your task to react to whatever hazards smoothly scroll into view.

As for the hazards. Well, fairly predictably, there are other cars (I counted about five different models), some (stationary) trucks and, every now and then, a police car positioned horizontally "road-block" style across a section of road. The other cars either do not react to your presence at all, or glide back and forth to impede your progress. In addition, there are also some "big boss" cars which attack at the end of each stage.

It's inadvisable to prang anything with your shiny automobile if you can help it, because it has a tendency to bounce off the target, turn at a 45-degree angle and skid in the opposite direction of your aim. You can recover from this skid by quickly rocking on the left/right control keys (or waggling of the joystick). In fact, in the "big boss" stages, you need to ram the computer's car off the road whilst not letting your own come to a fiery end, so mastering how to recover is essential. Later stages, if you can reach them, introduce broken down cars at the sides of the road, and bridges peppered with holes.

To navigate around all of these various hazards, you use accelerate (Space), brake (N) and cursor left or right to steer. When you have moving cars, bridge holes and broken-down automobiles to contend with, this does take some skill. However, I found the brake key to be quite awkwardly placed - it would, in my opinion, have been much better to have cursor up for accelerate and cursor down for brake. Having said that, though, and particularly in the case of the yellow car, braking itself feels rather unnecessary because there is such a dramatic slowdown as soon as you release the accelerate key anyway.

You have a choice each time you play of selecting a yellow car (Easy) or a red car (Hard). The instructions inform you that the yellow car is for beginners and the red car for veterans. Now, as far as lastability goes, that's quite a welcome inclusion because not only do the two cars handle radically differently, but the red car consumes fuel much more quickly. Don't forget that, if your fuel runs out, it doesn't matter how many cars you've avoided or how well you've navigated all the hazards; no fuel equals immediate game over. If you're driving the yellow car, you can comfortably miss two fuel cans in every three and still hope to clear the level. If you're driving the red car, you need to know exactly where your car needs to be positioned in order to collect every last fuel can!

Highway Fighter looks very nice - the cars, the roads, the scenery flying past - it all feels very early Grand Theft Auto-esque. It also sounds pretty snazzy too - the rolling party tunes are reminiscent of the Sega arcade games of old. I found myself thinking "This is kind of like an overhead view of Out Run!" whilst playing, and thats probably what Kai Magazine intended. The "big boss" cars are a good idea too, and needing to keep them in the middle of the road whilst rocking left and right to prang them injects something extra to what might otherwise have become a repetitive "avoidathon".

However, for all of this praise, Highway Fighter does have some glaring shortcomings. Firstly, remember those holes in the bridges I mentioned? Well, the computer-controlled cars just glide right over them. This gravity-defying feat looks decidedly odd.

Secondly, each time you collide with something, you crash, lose a bit of fuel and restart the game a little further down the road from where you crashed. That is except for when you actually do run out of fuel, whereupon your car slows to a crawl, then to a standstill, before it is unceremoniously flung into an unrecoverable skid and crash. The game then acts exactly as it does when you crash with some fuel remaining, and so restarts you a little further down the road before ultimately deciding that, with no fuel, it is in fact game over. This is also decidedly odd behaviour, and just wastes your time.

Thirdly, in this game, collecting those fuel cans is ultimately what will determine your success or failure. Now, when you're playing a stage for the first time, you have no idea when these cans will appear, or where they will be. Nevertheless, if you've got honed reactions, one might think the game would allow for you to career across the road to grab them from either the left or the right. But it doesn't. You more or less have to hit a fuel can head-on to collect it. It can feel very frustrating to practically drive over 80% of the can from a 45-degree angle and yet still not acquire it!

Highway Fighter is a game where practice makes perfect. Each time you play it, you'll intuitively remember what's about to scroll into view and take the evasive action required. In this way, you'll avoid more cars and you'll get further, until you ultimately clear each stage. Technically, it's very impressive - it may well be the best game of its type on the MSX - and it's ridiculously easy to get into because, with the exception of that skidding feature, it could be played without any instructions whatsoever.

Whilst Highway Fighter is let down by a few visual and gameplay quirks, these aren't anything major enough for me not to recommend it.

1. Flicker-free graphics and scrolling
2. Music is top quality and very bouncy
3. A game you can pick up and play instantly (as long as you know how to recover from a skid!)
4. "Big boss" cars introduce variety and take skill to conquer

1. Some odd sprite and gameplay quirks
2. The brake key is awkward to reach when playing with keyboard
3. Fuel cans can be hard to pick up from any angle other than head on
4. To progress you need to learn the layout of each road
5. When you can download thousands of free MSX games, is this one really worth 12 Euros of your hard-earned cash?