Lotus Turbo Challenge II gives you the chance to drive a beautiful Lotus Elan or Esprit at insane speeds, through exotic locations, without the slightest possibility of either crashing or being stopped by the law. As such you can't help but recommend it in the fun stakes - the Amiga Power team are well known for their liberal interpretations of the speed limit at times, but this is real wish fulfilment stuff. If we really drove like we drive Lotus II we'd all have been locked up long ago.

Of course, you could say similar things about hundreds of other driving games, couldn't you? Well no, not really - they may or may not be fun (depending on the game), but almost universally they bear previous little relation to the actual act of driving itself. If they've (deservedly, by the way) come in for some stick for being a little bit samey lately, they equally deserve to be slagged for how unrealistic they all are.

Lotus II, on the other hand, while sharing plenty of surface similarities with its peers - the action is presented from your standard behind-view, pseudo-3D perspective, for instance - succeeds in being both great fun in an arcade-style way as well as remarkably true to real driving. In look, feel and ambition it quite confidently leaves its rivals munching on exhaust fumes.

Make no mistake then - this is one much-hyped game that actually turns out to deserve its pre-release reputation. Cynical readers (and of course, cynical journos like ourselves) - even those who enjoyed the first Lotus game - will have taken all the pre-release hype with a lorry load of road-salt, but it seems we needn't have bothered after all. Gremlin have mixed speed with convincing graphics, imagination, a good feel and simple care to produce, I'd say the best sprite-based driving game ever on the Amiga.

It's a pleasant surprise that this isn't a game in which you're forced to race against dim-witted computer opponents. You can either slog it out with the elements - much like in real fast driving, where you're not actually racing anyone, just trying to get somewhere fast - or take on one, two or even three (!) pals in the split screen or computer link version (more of that later). There's no racetrack as such - this is all out on the open road, and the only way to progress is to get to the checkpoints in time (OutRun-style, in fact).

In the first levels, this is easy-peasy, but later on, with furious weather conditions to cope with, it gets altogether more challenging. Of course, there are other cars on the road, but they seem to be about as intelligent as the oil slicks and felled trees that litter the roads. Really they exist merely to get in your way rather than try and beat you.

One trouble with the first Lotus was that, despite being a graphically excellent drive, it was badly flawed in the crash recovery department. If you got tangled up with an obstacle, the car would slow to a halt (it wouldn't actually flip upside down though, OutRun-style) making getting back into the race a real pain because the blasted car took so long to get itself started again.

Lotus II has fixed that, but in doing so has created some problems of its own. Now you don't stop at all - Lotus (the company) have apparently insisted that none of its expensive kit gets damaged even in computer simulation (the softies) - so instead of bringing you to an abrupt halt, hitting something just makes the control go wibbly and slows you down a bit. This makes the game faster and saves the getting-started-again problem, but equally it makes it difficult to judge just how appalling your mistake was without your keeping a keen eye on the speedo.

It's a moot point, but in the end I think I'd say this non-stopping is a good thing - though, of course, it's pretty hard to take a game totally seriously when slamming into a lorry at 140mph just slows you down to 20mph (instead of simply mashing you).

Still, that's all part of what makes it such an unusual game - it's so very arcade-like in speed and smoothness terms, while much of the actual driving experience it's trying to emulate (the way the two different cars handle, say) is so realistic. Unusual, but it works.

The other really unusual thing about the game is the style and range of the weather conditions presented - and how they really affect the way your car handles and you play the game. Throughout though, the cars handle a treat (just different enough from one another to be noticeable), the sweeping descents into valleys and blind hill tops (as in the first game) are as exciting as ever, and, of course, the programmers have made no mistakes with the parallax scrolling. As a one-player game it's simply excellent.

That said though, the best, best thing about it is the ability to play against your pals. As we've often said before, computer games are always best when you're trying to whip your buddies, and I reckon this applies especially to driving games. The horizontally split-screen option (carried over from the first Lotus game) puts you head-to-head against a pal using the same computer without any noticeable loss of speed - I would say that this is the best way to play the game, except (a) Stuart beat me every time we played, so there must be something wrong and (b) if you link two computers with a lead you can either play a friend with a full screen each, or split both screens for four (four!) simultaneous players. It's quite something.

So is it worth buying? Well, yes, of course - it may not be perfect, but it's probably the most atmospheric game of its kind, and most certainly the most fun. Definitely recommended.

Uppers: Gorgeous graphics, lashings of speed and that hard-to-capture real driving atmosphere - especially when you're up against human opponents. The most together traditional-style driving game yet.

Downers: Suffers a little from Lotus' insistence on banning any crash sequences. And there aren't any decent maps to tell you how close you are to the next checkpoint, either.

The Amiga has suffered from plenty of disappointments when it comes to driving games. Lotus II is not one of them. (In fact, it's rather excellent.)