Team 17 have created a shoot-'em-up, a platformer and a beat-'em-up, but most surprisingly of all have never produced a racing game. Well, to put wrongs to rights, the Teamies have brought out for your deliberation a racer that calls itself Overdrive.

I don't know anybody who dislikes this type of game. Is it because everybody feels the need fo speed and fantasises about becoming a top racing driver? Maybe, but I'll never know unless someone conducts a worldwide games survey!

The first racer I ever played was Pole Position and by Jingo what a cracker it was. OK, looking back now it looks amateurish and very basic, but it was easy, fun to play and highly addictive.
Since those days, racers have steadily progressed from being incredibly basic to being intricate, technical and realistic. The work that went into MicroProse's Formula One Grand Prix was just mind-blowing.

Team 17 seem to have conquered every genre in the Amiga world and now they've turned their hand to the racing game, but how will they fare this time? Well, as per usual they've produced a damn fine piece of Amiga software. I'll sum the rest up later, but first some handy information.

Overdrive feature four different style vehicles, five terrains, 20 tracks and eight different characters each with their own unique style. There are four different game modes to choose from: Arcade, practice, trails and two-player.

The single player arcade mode is the main one and the one that the game is based around. It offers you a selection of race scenarios to choose from as you progress through the ranks. In order to have the final "race-off" against the demon driver (the final objective), you must achieve the game's top-rank. You are given an amount of cash to start with because it costs money to enter each race, but the harder the race, the better the prize.

Before you start the race you have the chance to qualify and aim for a better grid position in three timed laps. This also acts as an aid to learning the circuit or if you've think you;re good enough you can jump straight into the race, starting at the back of the grid.

Improvements can be made to your vehicle by picking up various parts which have been liberally spread out all over the track.

Items like wheels, spanners and fuel increase your car's handling and performance in subsequent races. Other pick-ups come in the form of extra cash and turbo pads and these too are littered on the tracks,

You continue racing until your cash runs or if you finish last in three different races. To make Overdrive even harder, in some races you must finish in first place to continue and others, notably the easier tracks, you have to avoid finishing last.

When you finally enter the "Overdrive Race-Off" against the demon driver, it can be any one of a number of specially configured "demon tracks", so this ensures that there are number of different endings to the game.

The other modes that you can race in are fairly self-explanatory. Practise allows you to practise on any of the tracks and two-player mode configures the use of a serial link where you race against human opposition on another Amiga. The last mode is the trials. This is a form of practice game that puts you up against the clock. You can select one of 20 configured trials with the aim of beating the best lap/race time. This means that you can practice your driving skills and still retain that competitive human spirit that remain within us all.

When I first loaded and played Overdrive I was slightly disappointed because it didn't play as well as I thought it should have done. It seemed incredibly difficult and the awkward control system just frustrated me.

After playing around with it I began to become more accustomed to the track and found I could at least give the computer players a good run for their money.

Overdrive is one of those games where you have to spend a certain amount of time practising before you even attempt to try and win a "proper" race. If you use the practice or trials modes you'll find that your ability to control the car will improve drastically and soon you'll be whizzing around like Damon Hill on class As.

The graphics are small, but are very detailed and displayed in 32 colours. Overdrive is incredibly fast and runs at a super smooth 50Mhz. The game also contains five excellent pieces of music to race to and there is a fair smattering of sound effects and samples.

Team 17's racer is one of those products that steadily grows on you. At first it seems very complicated, but as you progress you get really engrossed and find yourself totally addictive. It is also perhaps one of the toughest race games I've played and tests your driving skills to the absolute limit.

For boy or girl racers wanting a tough yet exciting arcade racer, you need look no further than Overdrive. Team 17 have produced another gem of a game and to be honest I can't see anyone beating them to the award for Software House of the Year.

Welcome folks and here's your super, soaraway 10-step, no-nonsense guide to Team 17's new brake-blockbuster Overdrive. One player. Two players, using a null modem cable. Three skill levels. Four types of car. Five terrain types. Six hours of disk accessing. Seven better things you can think of doing while waiting. Eight different computer drivers to race. Nine lives are for the cats, not cars. 10-pin bowling bowling bears little resemblance to Overdrive.

"This is a tannay announcement. Would Mr Stephen Bradley please return to the Inevitable Comparisons department on the fifth floor."

Seen it all before?
Eeh, them stairs, they'll be the death of me. So this Overdrive, bit like that Micro Machines, eh? Diddy motors - racing cars, buggies and four by fours zooming around little tracks (and Supercars as well, young Bradley). It all looks the same to me. OK, so there are no breakfast tables, pool tables or baths to manoeuvre your machine around, but what the heck, this game could have been called Very Small Machines.

Oh, but if only this game had appeared on the Amiga a couple of months ago. Then we could have told you about the superfast cars, the fabulous scrolling, the great top-down view. Hang on there just a minute, we still can.

I mean, it's not as if we have to constantly refer to That Other Game. Come on Overdrive, stand up and be counted - get some blood on your tyres.

In the arcade challenge, you get a bundle of cash at the start of the game to enter races, and the harder the race, the bigger the prize. Race around the track against two computer drivers collecting pick-ups to enhance performance. Come last in three races and you will find yourself completely skint.

A touch too late...
No, I can't go on with this. Even if there had been a two-player option, Overdrive would still compare unfavourably against That Other Game. A case of bad timing for Team 17, I'm afraid. Sure, this game is good, polished fun but it goes down by three falls and a submission.

It's been a bit of a funny month, this month. On one hand, we've got a load of games which have appeared all of a sudden out of nowhere - the likes of Turrican 3 and Theatre Of Death, which just appeared on our doorstep almost without warning. Then we've got this, Blastar, Uridium 2, Donk and even Alfred Chicken. I suppose, a clutch of titles which have had difficult and protracted births and have only just finally made it here after what seemed like years of waiting, rejigging and slipping deadlines. And the funny thing is, it doesn't seem to have made any difference at all.

With the possible exception of Uridium 2, the games that we've been hanging around for ages for aren't any better than the ones which just turned up out of the blue - and more importantly, they don't seem to be significantly better than they were, say, a year ago.

To be fair, Overdrive hasn't actually been all that long in the making - it's just missed a lot of release targets, so it seems that way. Still, seeing how it's turned out in the end, I think I'd rather have waited another couple of months.

Overdrive is, as you can probably tell, an overhead-view Super Sprint-type racing game. It's got five different racing scenes, encompassing deserts, icy wastes and city streets among others, and four different types of vehicle to race through them, using two different control methods.

The most surprising thing about Overdrive, though, is that these are pretty much the most impressive technical statistics on offer. Oh sure, it's fast and smooth in that 50Hz-update kind of way, but otherwise you might be rocked back slightly on your heels by the relative, well, pedestrian-ness of it.

For a start, there are never more than three cars on screen at a time - you race either against the clock or against just two computer-controlled opponents, most of whom you won't see for most of the race. And there's another thing - computer-controlled opponents. There's no two-player mode in Overdrive, unless you link up two Amigas with a null-modem cable, and that's a major drawback as far as long-term game life goes.

Also, the game's structure appears to be almost non-existent. You get what appears to be a different, random selection of tracks every time you load it up, which means it's very difficult to generate any feeling of progress either as you go through a single game or as you play lots and improve over time. Even the main menu screen is cluttered and confused, and you have to search around for any useful information you want to glean from it.

And how about those old Team 17 strong points, Mr Graphics and Mr Sound? Well, the graphics are fine enough in themselves, but the level o zoom-in on the track is exactly wrong - it's not close enough for a real down-on-the-road feel, but it's too close to give any kind of overall graphical impression of the surroundings, or any useful idea of where the next corner's coming from.

There's a scanner for that purpose, but let's face it, scanners are crap and nobody ever looks at them and the screen space would be better used on, I don't know, a nice picture of a teddy bear or something.
The one in Overdrive (scanner, that is, not teddy bear. Obviously. You're just being silly now.) is worse than most anyway, being pretty zoomed-in itself and hence very little better than just looking at the track, where you at least get a big arrow on the road to warn you of corners fractionally before they happen.

And as for the sound, it starts of alright with good rocking tunes accompanying the standard revving and screeching sound effects, but after a lap or two the music seems to run out of puff and shakes and stutters and eventually loses its way altogether, to much an extent that it's distracting and annoying.

All these presentation and aesthetic flaws could be saved by gameplay, but, er, they aren't. There's nothing really very wrong with the gameplay, you understand - indeed, the actual driving of the car's got a nice feel to it, and it's nice to have two options when it comes to control, even though the second one (an absolute directional control, whereby to go, say, down and right you move the joystick down and right, as opposed to the usual rotational control) is horribly unfamiliar and unworkable.

The difficulty curve is reasonable, although it's a bit too easy to lose a race by making one wrong turn at the start and watching the computer cars race off into the distance, never to be seen again no matter how flawlessly you seem to drive for the rest of the eight laps of the race (and there's another unfortunate mistake - eight laps is far too many in a game like this, and just gets tedious).

It's just that there's been nothing here that hasn't been done better before. And there, as they say, is the rub.

The truth is that pretty much every other Amiga game in this genre is better than Overdrive. Psygnosis' ancient Nitro is better-looking, more varied and more playable. The little-remembered Champion Driver from Idea is just as fast, but prettier and more controllable. Supercars 2 from Gremlin has the two-player mode (albeit flawed) and the Codies' Micro Machines, of course, has all the features of all of them put together and then some. Any or all of them are a better bet than Overdrive, and that makes this an even bigger disappointment than last month's F17 Challenge. Pull your socks up, Team 17.

Top-view racing games are a bit old hat in most people's eyes. The genre is as old as the hills and there are many who say that it has gone as far as it can. Naturally, these aren't people who have played either Micro Machines or Overdrive - the latest in a very consistent line of hits from Team 17.

BUY ONE, GET ONE FREE
Overdrive is practically two games in one. First, you have the arcade game, where you have to race against a succession of drivers, each better than the one before, until you reach the final challenge and claim victory. The second game is a time-trials challenge, where you have to race a variety of vehicles over a number of courses against the clock. This is slightly easier than the arcade version and gives you the option to get some practice in.

You have four different cars to control in Overdrive, ranging from a GP to a Super sports car. All have their own strengths and weaknesses, as you would expect. The speed and manoeuvrability isn't really an issue, as you only ever race against vehicles of the same type.

The only thing that exploits the weaknesses is the course you are racing on. There are five different types, from Grand Prix courses to icy roads, and the vehicle you are in greatly affects the difficulty of the course. A 4x4 will have little difficulty in the desert terrain, but would be wasted in the city. A GP car is far too fast for the city circuits, but perfect on a racetrack.

By mixing these elements together, you can tailor the game to suit your playing level, making the game as easy or as difficult as you like. Just as well, really, as this is not a very easy game to play.

Sure, the controls are very responsive, and it goes without saying that it's incredibly playable. What makes it so tough is the speed. Everything just whips along at such a rate that it's often hard to anticipate corners, and you end up careering all over the shop. Once you become familiar with a track, then the fun really kicks in. Before you know it, you're racing over every turbo pad there is, leaving the other drivers coughing your dust.

Of course, it can't all be good, or it would have got a mark of 100%. The biggest problem is the horrendous loading times. As the levels vary greatly, the game has to load in complete graphics for each race, which can take a lot longer than the race itself in some cases! One particular thing that annoyed me was the way that the program needs to load the track after you've finished qualifying. Surely the course is already resident in memory at that point?

Some of the presentation screens are a little bland too. I would have liked to have seen a lot more in the way of animated faces - maybe the other drivers passing verdict on your driving skills, but that's really just nitpicking.