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"The Last V8" is a decidedly difficult game to play. It takes raw skill, dogged persistence, a certain knack for computer driving and lots and lots of practice. The blurb confirms last night's morbid dream. The world is under the debilitating sway of a nuclear winter. Tucked away in a radiation-proof shelter, you while away the hours by cannibalising automobiles to produce a souped-up V8.

Now the time is ripe to venture above ground to seek out humans left on the surface (they would surely have mutated by now... but that's another computer game, innit?). No sooner are you on the surface when a gruff, hoarse voice urges "V8, return to base immediately".

Before you can scoot the 4.5 kilometres to safety, a retarded nuclear bomb is virtually certain to cut short your journey, with no possibility of the AA lending a hand. To be honest, I didn't get very far. I only drove through the countryside. Purely by courtesy of demo-mode did I get to hear more soft speech and see inside the bunker, still leaving the base totally unexplored. In fact, my only view of "home" was the squinny pictures on the insert.

The screen is split into three horizontal sections. The top part shows an aerial view of the road, which scrolls as you drive. Sandwiched in the middle are all the instruments you'd expect to find (including a distance to base readout), while the bottom sector is devoted to mere decoration. Left and right increases/decreases your speed... gear changing is automatic; up turns you right and down steers left.

The Last V8 is not for beginners. The car is tiny and it can move very fast. This means that the bends that appear as the screen scrolls are very difficult to take.

This is not necessarily a bad thing as this type of game has to be tough to be interesting. What is annoying though is that every time you crash it takes a good few seconds, an annoying jingle, and a couple of other unnecessary frills before you go right back to the beginning again.

M.A.D. games is supposed to be Mastertronic's slightly dearer, slightly better, new range of games.

I can't really see the improvement in quality - many of the £1.99 jobs are just as good, if not better, than The Last V8.

For my money, you would be much better off scrounging another fiver from somewhere and buying a really decent game rather than this really average one.