Praise the lord, our prayers have been answered! I was waiting for this for a long time. The last futuristic racer we've been "blessed" with was Millennium Racer, and although it was a racer, and indeed futuristic, it was hardly worthy of the 'Millennium' title. I wouldn't even mention other racers, partly because they don't fit the genre, and also because they were far from spectacular (Swamp Buggy Racer comes to mind *puke*). Of course, Need For Speed: Porsche Unleashed was released shortly before this, but then again, that's not exactly futuristic. So if you've had enough of driving along the palm trees in the twilight, while the wind blows through your hair, and the setting sun reflects in your designer sun glasses, maybe you should take a ride with Rollcage. Blow some opponent's ass with your driller rocket while driving on the ceiling of that tunnel at 450 mph.

Still not convinced? Well, let's see what this baby has in stock. First - the graphics (*drool*). You want your dynamic lights? You got 'em! Want your dynamic environments? Done! Explosions, weather effects, dust? All there... and the sky, my god, the sky! Sometimes I just feel like letting others blow my ass sky-high just so I could look at that marvalous sky! Imagine all this at 1024x768 resolution (yes, yes, I know it goes higher, but I was blessed with a monitor that can only go as high). It of course does feature 32 bit colour (providing that you have one of them nice nVidia cards) but it looked just as good on my Voodoo3 3500. No frame rate loss, not even when the time warp effect was on, or when the buildings explode around you. Speaking of the time warp effect, have you ever been high on shrooms? Well, this is what it feels like it. Can make you dizzy, but then again, we like that no?

Next comes the sound. The game supports all the major current 3D environmental APIs, and although I played it with an A3D Vortex 2 soundcard, I experienced some problems while playing, so I defaulted to the regular software driver. One other great thing about this is the soundtrack. Rollcage features 12 drum'n'bass / jungle tracks from a pretty nice collection of UK and worldwide artists. This is pretty standard for this type of game, but it's very fitting nonetheless.

The gameplay is where this title excels at. As I said before, we haven't had a lot of good futuristic racers lately. So going back to the good old ceiling driving and opponent shooting that we liked so much in the original Rollcage isn't that bad after all. Of course, there's about 5 game modes to choose from, namely: League (Win tracks based on points), Arcade (play on any of the tracks opened in league mode against 4 opponents), Time Attack, Training (on 10 special training tracks), Scramble (finish a track under a give time), Survivor (like league, but with no continues), All tracks and Demolition (Destroy all objects on track in shortest time possible). It also supports split screen (when was the last time we've seen THAT in a PC game) or netowrk and TCP/IP multiplayer.

The only drawback is the steep learning curve for the controls, but once you get used to it this game is a blast, literally.

[ 20/20 ] Graphics
[ 13/15 ] Sound
[ 28/30 ] Gameplay
[ 19/20 ] Fun Factor
[ 02/05 ] Multiplayer
[ 09/10 ] Overall Impression