Excessive Speed

Oh dear. Not exactly what the world is waiting for, Excessive Speed turns the clock back at least a decade and resurrects the top-down racing game, once a mainstay of sweaty seaside arcades. While it's hardly the most ambitious of projects, Swedish developers Chaos Works have still somehow contrived to cock it up. To the layman, being able to identify your car would appear to be a good idea, if not something of a prerequisite. This isn't always the case in Excessive Speed though, with identical vehicles making for major problems in the midst of the action. Furthermore, being able to see where you're going is nigh on impossible, although this owes as much to the limitations of the genre as it does to poor design.

Apart from that, Excessive Speed is actually a fairly polished effort, with a number of different game modes providing a reasonable challenge. There's a fair selection of cars to choose from, and some 14 uniquely themed tracks, all of which are also reversible.

Power-ups and weapons are picked up en route, and the races are fairly frantic affairs, more than capable of causing thumb damage if played with a joypad. The generic dance music is even quite passable.

However, unless they're being paid to do so, no one's going to bother finding this out, as there are hundreds of better games available. At best Excessive Speed is a poor man's Micro Machines. At under a tenner, it's within the reach of all but the poorest of men.