NYR: New York Race

The gridlocked streets of New Yoik are hardly the perfect setting for a racing game, hence driving games previously set in the Big Apple, or near approximations of it, have offered slightly more than simple track-based racing - Grand Theft Auto being one. Thankfully the highways of New York Race are a good deal higher than you're used to, as the game takes as its sole inspiration the taxi chase scenes of The Fifth Element, where jelly-mould cars hover in mid air, and can reach nosedive speeds of 500mph. It's the future.

Effectively what you're doing then is racing planes, with a great deal more freedom than if you were glued to a strip of tarmac. Consequently you can benefit from screaming into a dive and overtaking under your opponents, usually before having to climb again into a narrow tube. Or nipping under street lamps, or over monorails - which although far from realistic, certainly quenches the thirst for console-style racing. It helps of course that NYR is a nippy little game, causing you in the early stages to scrape past neon-lit skyscrapers or plunge through the bright urban landscape.

Graphically NY Race isn't harmed at all by its obvious PS2 graphical leanings. Even though this causes your opponents to become a blur of colour among the bright buildings, the helpful swirls of vapour that tail behind make up for it.

The only real problem is that this is a racing game, and a typically shallow one which follows the same formula of dozens before it. The highlight is to progress through a rather tired Championship Mode, unlocking new vehicles as you go. It certainly isn't a game to keep you at your PC for any length of time and though it might be fast and fun for a while, Crazy Tax/this certainly isn't.