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Highway Hawks isn't about leisurely law-abiding right-side-of-the-road driving. Maiming, killing, burning and shooting is more the name of the game here.

Strictly speaking, this isn't a race game, as it doesn't matter where you finish in relation to the other cars, and there's no time limit. Instead, just managing to survive long enough to reach the finishing line is all that's needed for qualification.

Your battered Ford Escort-lookalike is capable of firing concentrated bolts of plasma energy (so concentrated, in fact, that the bullets are just two pixels large). But there's no explosion when an enemy car is shot, no great shards of twisted flaming metal... Instead, the opposition just disappears without trace.

Points acquired for frying innocent motorists are traded in between races for such awesome customisations as vaporisers, a laser cannon and the imaginatively named 'Super Tough'.

Squeeze off a couple of rounds at a juggernaut and you could find yourself in for a surprise. The rear doors may swing open to release useful (or not so useful) items. At best, you get a crate of ammunition; at worst, you find yourself spinning out of control on a puddle of oil (honest guv, it fell off the back of a lorry!).

Fuel is the most important factor, so it's necessary to make constant bee-lines for the fuel stars that are dropped from the multitude of tankers. There's a free set of crystal wine glasses for every six gallons collected (at participating stations only).

Highway Hawks is, arguably, the most enjoyable attempt at a Road Blasters game to date, but to be fair that's only because previous efforts weren't much to shout about. It's certainly one of the speediest race games around, and for once you don't get the impression of the car staying still, while the road scrolls under it.

However it seems that, in order to achieve this effect, the quality of the sprites and backdrops had to suffer. Weaving between traffic and blowing away cars is fun (even without any explosions), but it's let down by the small sprites and bland backdrops.

At the very least, Highway Hawks shows that speedy graphics manipulation in a race game is possible, and had the aesthetics matched their speed this could well have been the best game of its type so far.

To appear only slightly behind the Amiga, this version will hit the shelves at the same price. The graphics and sound should only be slightly weaker, but more importantly the gameplay is expected to survive the transition intact. Watch out for an update next month.