Not so long ago as I write, I was taking part in a weekly high score challenge with a bunch of long-standing online gaming friends, and that week we were playing RoadBlasters, Atari’s 1987 arcade racing game where you’re trying to get your armed-to-the-teeth sports car through fifty treacherous rally races before you run out of fuel. You can shoot enemy cars to get them to drop more of it (as well as keep racking up a very cool multipler mechanic), and sometimes a helicopter will appear with some beefier weapons to pick up, and it plays fast and loose and as much like a shooter as it does a racer… And I’ve never really liked it! After then giving it little more than a cursory go to get a score on the table, I explained it was probably a combat-racer thing rather than anything wrong with the game itself – I immediately thought about Taito’s Chase H.Q. from 1988, which I like even less, and the technical marvel and (GTA-inspiration) that is Durell’s Turbo Esprit on the ZX Spectrum in 1986. Then there’s 1993’s Rock ‘n Roll Racing on the SNES as well, which ticks even more boxes than any of those in theory should, with all that stone-cold classic heavy metal playing in the background. Top-down too, which is another thing I’m into, but it’s just never clicked no matter how hard I’ve tried (and having spent actual money on it, I really have)!

That reminded me of Bally-Midway’s Spy Hunter though, which is a genuine all-time favourite. Same for Atari’s 1989 Super Sprint follow-up Badlands, especially its Commodore 64 conversion, which I have a real soft-spot for! And jumping forwards a few more years, there was the last-man-standing chaos of Twisted Metal on the original PlayStation in 1995, which to this day is the most I’ve played of any demo for any game ever, and was one of those rare occasions where I loved what was on the front of that magazine so much that I didn’t need any more at the time! I did buy a copy of that more recently, although I’m not sure I’ve ever played much more of that than I did originally! Great game either way, and I’m not even going to get into whether or not more great stuff like Mario Kart counts as combat-racing because you get the point – it’s probably not the genre I’m not into after all! And as you might have already guessed, the game that convinced me of that more than any of the ones I’ve just mentioned is the reason we’re gathered here today, and of course, it’s Overlander on Atari ST, which I reckon might have been the very first game I bought after I got my ST (excluding Star Wars, which I got with it), right around the time it was released on there by Elite Systems towards the end of 1988, as well as on the Amiga, ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64 and Amstrad CPC. And while the Spectrum version in particular is to be commended, it was always a 16-bit game to me, and in the days when screenshots alone would often sell a game to you, I just couldn’t resist those gorgeous colours peering back at me from the back of the box!

Before we get into the game itself though, I wanted to briefly dwell on its luxurious loading screen! It’s one of my favourites on the system, as confirmed by its inclusion in my Top Ten Favourite Atari ST Loading Screens countdown, where I said… “I’m not sure it’s the greatest illustration of a homemade, souped-up armoured car from the future ever but just look at those perfectly chosen colours, and just look at that lighting! Forget ray-tracing, this is the power of the 16-bit machine in action, with some really stunning reflections and shadows, not least underneath the car itself. It’s funny, as I write I’ve just finished a walking sim called Return to Grace on Xbox, which has a real sixties, retro-futurism, sci-fi vibe, and this reminds me of that but through late-eighties, Miami Vice eyes, with those decadent, single-shaded reds and blues evolving a definite, period neon spirit. As does that Overlander signage at the top, with colour graduation that really can’t escape its own time, although I don’t think the Elite logo ever looked better than its flamboyantly understated imprint across the bottom! Altogether, as cool as Don Johnson!” Nice tune playing along as you stop to admire it too, with this steady, punchy, gunshot-techno with melodic echoes of Peter Gunn from the aforementioned Spy Hunter, which then transitions to a far more upbeat piece of chiptune electronica that’s hardly memorable but I’ll happily leave it lingering every time I fire it up. There’s no more music in-game, unfortunately, but the engine noises, various weapon sounds and non-stop explosions are perfectly adequate in its absence.

Speaking of in-game, we find ourselves in the very year I’m writing this and you might be reading it, 2025, where the disappearance of the ozone layer – no doubt after all that hairspray abuse in the 1980s – means the entire planet now resembles Death Valley, USA, all scorched earth and with little in the way of vegetation. All that unfiltered radiation from the sun means everyone left has to live underground too, and vast, subterranean cities have evolved, linked only by the old freeways that are now ruled by anarchic gangs of surface-dwelling outlaws… Which probably involves a plot-hole bigger than the one in the ozone layer! Anyway, we’ll go with it because that’s where the Overlanders (aka you) also come in! They’re a bunch of customised car nerds driving pre-apocalypse vehicles dragged underground and rebuilt for speed and survival. Their only purpose in life is improving their cars, and to pay for that, they’re the only ones who’ll run the gauntlet between cities, carrying various precious cargoes for their inhabitants and earning big bucks in the process… In theory! At the beginning of each journey, you’re given the choice of two sets of cargo to transport to the next city, one of which is legitimate goods for the Federation, while the other contains more illicit items for the Crimelords. As you might imagine, the latter pays out more money but is way more valuable to the gangs on the surface too, who’ll come at you far more aggressively to get their hands on it.

Before you head out, you’re given half the payment for the job up-front, which you can then use to buy fuel, weapons and upgrades for the trip. The instructions encourage you to buy just the right amount of fuel because the distance between cities can vary, but I tend to just fill up then spend or save whatever’s left, which in reality means never buying anything else because I’ll decide to save up for something really good then never reach another customisation screen again! Anyway, in principle, once you’re fuelled you can buy additional firepower, like surface-to-surface missiles and homing rockets, or extra armour, battering rams or wheel-blades, or you can focus on the driving with better engines, nitrous oxide and the like, or you could just go for extra lives on top of the six you start with… Which is still nowhere near enough because Overlander is all sorts of unfair! To highlight this, let’s have a look at what you might encounter as you drive through the “easier” of the two missions offered on lowly level one… From the very outset, you’ll probably get into a ramming battle with the first car that appears, and you can do that with any other car you like, but the slightest touch from one of the motorbikes that then turn up means you instantly explode! Shoehorned story reasons are no excuse either, especially when that also includes them appearing out of nowhere from behind you… And even more so when they don’t even appear but just hit you head on from behind before they even get a chance to get onto the screen!

You’ll soon come across some gun emplacements along the sides of the road, and they’re firing machine guns across it in streams you need to try and drive between if you can, or even better, take them out before you get there, although that’s easier said than done… Especially when you don’t even know they’re there because the first few of them are hidden in the dips between a series of ups and downs and arounds in the road! Later in the level, there’s then a bunch of overturned cars (which for years I thought were flamethrowers!) at the side of the road, stretching out a little way into it, and that kind of thing is all good, but from the outset there’s also a good chance that random bits of regular roadside decoration, such as rocks and trees, are also going to be slightly encroaching the edges without any warning, and, of course, that’s usually when you’re flying around a corner and you’ve got no chance of even seeing them coming, let alone avoiding them! And obviously, you’ll also find random signage placed right in the middle of the road through various sections because it’s a late eighties racing game, so I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt on that one, but there will also be times when you simply don’t know what caused the latest ball of flames you’ve just found yourself in, which is no good whenever you’re playing! Suspect collision detection doesn’t help either, but honestly, it’s always moving at such pace that it’s hard to say how suspect it really is, and thankfully it does work both ways! And you’re going to have your hands full with all that other stuff I just mentioned anyway, as well as the game’s inherent difficulty, which is hardly what I’d call well-balanced but is at least a bit more predictable!

And either way, it’s mostly learnable, with each gang posing a different threat and a different attack pattern as they try to get their hands on your car and its cargo. The Crawlers don’t have their own vehicles but are behind those big signs and overturned cars blocking the road, and some of those gun emplacements too. The Roadhogs drive armoured limos and will try to run you off the road, while The Kamikazees have those stupid explosive-rigged motorbikes, as well as loads of fancy driving skills to make them hard to both avoid or deal with. Hardest of all are The Offroaders though, who drive huge monster trucks that soak up bullets and also have an armed terrorist mounted on the back, chucking petrol bombs at you if you’re lucky but will soon also have elephant guns, anti-aircraft guns and bazookas in their arsenal. Still, none of them are a patch on a bit of dead tree branch hanging over the side of the road! Anyway, it’s when you’re dealing with these things at full pelt that the game becomes its most enjoyably frantic, which is an oddity in itself as you constantly remind yourself there’s no clock and there’s no prizes for getting there first, and it’s just about getting there in one piece, but you won’t be able to resist its speed, its smooth movement and all those gorgeous, exhilarating undulations regardless! It feels nice too – totally arcade-like, which is exaggerated even more by the almost binary, partly-side-on car animation as you turn, but you’re always in control, particularly playing as nature intended on a proper joystick rather than a modern gamepad, better reflecting the loose but responsive steering.

Controls themselves are pretty standard, with up to accelerate, down to brake, left and right as as you’d expect, then fire for your regular cannon shot thing, and either down and fire or the space key as you prefer for any special weapons you’ve picked up. These then show up on your dashboard, which is a cool mix of Mad Max dirty metallics and colourful Knight Rider display tech, in that timelessly cool late-eighties graphic equaliser style! I’m not sure where the action plays out on the screen is quite as timeless but I can certainly tell you that it was about as cool as it got back in 1988! Actually, I think we probably need to break down everything we’re looking at there because the burning oranges of the subtly detailed desert sunset in the opening stage are still a sight to behold but less so the generic midday gradients backing the rocky drama of the second stage, then the plain old starfield in the third stage could have been ported straight from a ZX81… Although given the difficulty, it’s unlikely that most people will ever experience that disappointment, and I’m genuinely not exaggerating when I say that because in well over three decades of playing this game, I’ve never seen it for real! Your car, on the other hand, is more of an immediate disappointment – especially given how it looked on the loading screen – with a decidedly 8-bit design that’s low on detail and excitement, which is in contrast to a lot of what the enemy gangs are driving, and the same goes for their gun emplacements and other roadside items too. It all combines to make for a good-looker though, whether in screenshots or in motion!

I’m not sure I ever saw this kind of thing for a game in quite so much detail before or since, but right inside the cover of the September 1988 issue of Computer & Video Games magazine, there was a huge, full-colour, oddly portrait (as shown above), double-page advert for Overlander, which featured a competitive analysis! Now, before I start pulling it apart, first I want to summarise my feelings towards the game, which are that despite the difficulty and some questionable fairness choices (mostly involving suicide cults on exploding motorbikes), I’ve always loved dipping in and out of Overlander, and I still think that initial desert environment is an absolute icon of the 16-bit era. As much as I do still enjoy it though, I wouldn’t rank it as an absolute favourite of mine… Unlike some of the games it’s comparing itself very favourably against in the little table on its big, swanky, strangely formatted C&VG advert! It’s up against Pole Position, Pit Stop, Nigel Mansell’s Grand Prix, Out Run (or “Outrun”), Road Blasters, Chequered Flag (which I assume is the Spectrum one) and WEC Le Mans (before there was a Spectrum (or any other) one). Probably a bit excessive, especially when you consider the relative age of many of these by that time, but anyway, it’s then comparing them all on seven key criteria, all of which have obviously been chosen to put a tick in every box for Overlander!

Let’s have a really quick look through those just to close here… “First Person Perspective” gets a tick for everyone, although I think they might want to check their definitions here! “Fast Action Simulation” then gets a tick for everyone except Chequered Flag, which might be primitive but I reckon is the closest of the lot to a simulation, so again, not sure about this one. “Armed Destruction” is a bit loaded but fair enough, Overlander and Road Blasters are the only ones to get a tick. “Stomach Churning Hilly Road” is a bit weird but if that’s a selling-point then so be it, and only this gets a tick but what about Out Run? Only a masterclass in this but maybe they always took a different route to the ones I’m thinking of. Or just never got far enough! “Player Controlled Vehicle Construction” gets another tick here, and also for Pit Stop, and if that’s your bag then fine. “First Class Magazine Reviews” is ticked for everything that isn’t “not applicable” which is Pole Position, Out Run and WEC Le Mans, but now I’m wondering what they’re actually referring to, whether original arcade games or conversions, because I reckon between them they probably scored pretty well regardless. Last one is “Available on Home Computer” which doesn’t apply to WEC Le Mans (yet) but everything else gets a tick. Overall, slightly pointless and “Unnecessarily Difficult” might have been a much better way to distinguish itself from the pack! Now I can see exactly why I’d not seen something like this before or since but top marks for someone at Elite making the effort to read a beginner’s guide to marketing all the same! And I suppose at the very least, we can conclude from it that if you want a combat-racer with vehicle customisation then Overlander is probably the droid you’re looking for… Which I can’t disagree with!

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