Interstate 76

Interstate 76 brings the mission-based approach that has worked so well in space sims down to the ground with a bump and a funk. It's 1976, the oil crisis has made the USA paranoid and chaos looms. As a reluctant vigilante, your mission is to get out there and take out the bad guys. Your car will be equipped with a minimum of a machine gun, missile launcher and oil spray - but who said you had to be a nice guy, just because you had silly trousers?

Like all the best mission games there's a training environment to get used to your controls. It's just as necessary as with a star fighter - there are plenty of key presses to absorb. Once you're on the road you get some initial guidance from your dead sister's sidekick, but increasingly the decisions are down to you and your sideburns.

Interstate 76 works surprisingly well. If you enjoy a traditional race driving game, you'll get all the opportunities to demonstrate your skills at staying on the road (as always, much harder than with a real car, for which we can all be thankful). If, like me, you find most driving games a trifle tedious (you mean it's even more fun than going round the M25? Wow!), the addition of the weapons, missions and not altogether friendly opponents will bring enough to the table to make this a winner. Multiplayer fans are well provided for with LAN, modem and Internet support. If you fancy the immediacy of these battles but don't have a flesh and blood opponent, there are instant melees to throw you in at the deep end.

A bit of a disk hog at 80-110 Mb, but a Win95 smoothie. I liked the option to play full screen or in a window, and the settings screens which look like paper documents - a neat touch. Activision has done it again.

Overall - great combination of mission-based shoot-up and driving game. Multiplayer a worthwhile extra. Priced around ú39.99 in the UK. 2 Win95 CDs.

Produced by Activision. Check the web site at: http://www.activision.com

Reviewed by Brian Clegg