Beam Breakers

A variety of modes are on offer, including the Championship, a 30-stage race around a collection of city locations marked out by a green pulsating tunnel track with checkpoints. You represent one of five gangs, aiming to put together the highest cumulative score. On your laps around the track, bonus packs can be picked up by driving through them, with the likes of Turbo pack, Repair pack and Shield available.

While aiming for these, you must also avoid the high-tech architecture and the rush hour traffic, which will cause damage to your vehicle, slowing you down. It's not just racing on offer though. A collection of missions can be undertaken, which guide you through your career as a gang member. Firing off Pizza delivery boxes at targets may not make for the most enthralling start, but the scenarios soon progress, with more adventurous missions, faster vehicles and upgrades becoming available.

Survival mode, where you evade police capture against the clock and Multiplayer options are also provided to keep Beam Breakers from getting stale. The controls are intuitive, if basic, with four directional keys, accelerate, brake, turbo and use/fire about the limits of your needs. It gives the game instant pick-up-and-play potential, but does prevent too much depth. The cars' handling is very forgiving, as surely all cars in the 22nd century will be.

The graphics are impressive, with some nice lighting effects and detailed cityscapes to hover around. However, they lack a sense of involvement, which is compounded by the mediocre sound effects.

If you were looking to design the perfect futuristic racing game, taking a pinch of Wipeout and adding a dash of Grand Theft Auto would seem to make the perfect recipe. While both these ingredients are present in Beam Breakers, there's a certain je ne sais quoi missing, which leaves a less than perfect taste in the mouth. Not to say that Beam Breakers is a bad game. It's good fun and light entertainment, but lacks the pure adrenaline that made the aforementioned games classics. --Jason Weston

There are five notorious gangs which operate throughout Neo York, each striving for power and control of the air. Players are thrust into this gangworld to compete in a series of dramatic races defying light beams which everyone else adheres to. Instead the player must weave through the traffic, smashing anything that blocks the path, including cars and bridges used by innocent pedestrians. This is the fast-paced world of the Beam Breakers.

Beam Breakers is one of the most original and breathtaking racing games ever created due to the superb combination of innovative 3-D racing where AntiGrav cars overtake from all sides and the super-fast vehicles can reach almost half the speed of sound.

Set across five unique and stunningly designed regions of Neo York, including Chinatown and Little Italy, Beam Breakers is not a game for the faint-hearted. Challengers compete in 30 epic races where progression to the next race can only be achieved by defeating all opponents.