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Picture the scene: It was a Monday morning. I arrived back in the office after two weeks' holiday. Mark said, "Did you have a nice time?" I told him I did. "We've got a present for you," he said, and gave me a big black Psygnosis box with a picture of a motorbike on the front. "We thought you'd like to review this," he said with an editorial twinkle in his eye. I was touched - they'd saved this motorbike game review for me because of my new-found interest in motorbikes.

"We saved this motorbike game review for you because no-one except the PR bloke from Psygnosis can keep the bike on the track for long enough to complete a race..." And, lo and be jiggered, neither could I! But persistence, as the saying goes, is... er... well it's jolly important anyway. So I stuck at it, and pretty soon I was actually able to get all the way round a course without destroying the bike. Within only half a day or so, I managed to qualify for a real race.

Red Zone is one of those polygon 3D affairs where you blast round a Grand Prix circuit as fast as you possibly can, if not faster. Because you're on a motorbike, you view occasionally tilts at bizarrely improbable angles as you bank the bike to 'take corners' (although in Red Zone, the phrase 'to take a corner' really ought to be redefined as 'to crash into a barrier in the most irritating way you can think of').

You can choose either a first or second person view and, when you first start playing, the second person view, where you can see your own bike, is the most useful. It gives you something of an idea of what happens as you ricochet around and lets you get to grips with controlling the bike a bit better. It's pretty difficult to judge distances, though, so you tend to hit the barriers even more frequently than usual and it's not really that much use for actual racing. So when you've got the hang of it you move back to the first person view. For reasons that are never adequately explored you can also choose side and rear views (When a bike's this difficult to control, why would you ever want to not look where you're going?).

When you finally manage to finish a race, you can watch a replay of it as seen from a helicopter. This really brings home the absurdly difficult control as you watch your bike slew wildly around the track looking for the 'racing line' into the next crash barrier. And in case that wasn't enough evidence, you also get statistics on how many times you hit the barrier and how many other riders you endangered. (I was so good that I managed to endanger up to 11, even when there were only five other riders in the race.)

It's very difficult to control, but with a bit of practice it does become slightly easier. But is it worth the effort? Well, no, frankly. 'Smooth' is not a word that would be used to describe the animation nor would anyone by very likely to say 'extremely attractive' when asked to describe the backgrounds. The backgrounds can be pepped up by adding all the extra detail offered on the options screen, and this does help to make the whole thing much nicer to look at. But at a price.

The animation moves from 'not very smooth' to 'very jerky and slow indeed' and you soon eschew scenery in favour of a bit of oomph. Doubtless there are some really great pictures of you when you win the championship (the one of you in bandages when you've written the bike off and been retired from the race is quite amusing) but I can't imagine very many people putting in the effort required to get that far.

It certainly isn't rubbish, don't get me wrong. Unfortunately, though, it isn't very easy, it isn't huge amounts of fun to play and it doesn't look utterly brilliant. I didn't expect to be World Champion first time out, but I wouldn't mind not crashing at every corner and I wouldn't mind if the corners looked pretty when I hit them.

Controlling a bike is a very physical thing and so it was inevitable that the control would be tricky to simulate. But smooth graphics are something we've come to expect and a miss here is slightly more significant.