So there you are, at the head of the pack. You've driven smartly, gently nudged one of your competitors to a flaming death over the edge of a towering cliff, let loose on another with a blast of machine gun fire, and kept your car pointed in the right direction despite slipping and sliding on a road so covered with ice you could play hockey on it. And now, you're stretching your lead. So far, so good.

But what's this? The overhead camera is behaving very oddly. You noticed earlier how it morphs occasionally from true overhead to a chase view wow powerleveling and back again. How it zooms in and out seemingly at will, and how you can't -- at all -- change to another camera. But this is far worse: now, as you pull farther in front of your rivals, and as the camera strains to fit the entire, expanding pack onto the screen, you come perilously close to reaching the edge of that screen.

Variety is certainly one of its strengths. In Drive to Survive, you could be on the aforementioned ice rink, or you could be off in the desert somewhere. You could be cruising the jam-packed highways of a modern North American megalopolis, zipping along a maze of hyper-elevated roadways, or twisting through a mountain pass.

The cars you drive and compete against change up almost as often as the scenery. From pickup trucks to muscle machines to sports cars, the menu is always evolving. Virtually everything handles and drives like a toy rather than a real vehicle, wow powerleveling which isn't necessarily a bad thing in a game such as this, but a dune buggy, for example, does feel different from a midsize car, which feels different from a subcompact. That said, one of the game's other faults is that the very same car you raced against previously will suddenly and inexplicably be faster (or slower) in the very next race. Consistency, then, is obviously not one of the game's strong suits.

On a far brighter note, developer Supersonic did a great job devising and implementing a set of seriously nifty weapons. Scattered randomly throughout most courses just like traditional power-ups, Drive to Survive's weapons run the gamut wow gold from machine guns to land mines, oil slicks, nasty rear-firing flame throwers and blinding flash pots. The fact that you must understand each one and know how to use it only adds to the fun.

The shotgun, for example, will impact another driver only if you use it while directly alongside him or her. Land mines will take a couple seconds to engage once dropped, and therefore should only be used on cars that are already substantially behind. Garbage pail-sized mortars are lobbed forward from the roof of your vehicle, hitting the ground and exploding several car lengths in front of you. Dumb bombs simply drop off the back, destroying whatever happens to be there at the time. Machine guns and heat seeking missiles are especially fun for the little targeting reticule that appears in front of your car once you've picked them up. wow gold Fighting to stay on course while lining up one of your rivals in the crosshairs is damned exhilarating.

In particularly aggressive events, it's not unusual to see a gaggle of burning, partially wrecked cars blasting the bejeezus out of each other, being knocked sideways, hurtling into bottomless chasms, and generally taking and giving more abuse than is morally right. Adding to the mayhem is a surprisingly sophisticated roster of driver insults. Hearing your rivals blurt, "This struggle arouses me," or warning that you are a "corpse to be" is just too funny. If only they wouldn't do it so often.

But in too many events, you feel the AI competition has an unfair advantage. Sometimes, out of nowhere, they'll be ungodly fast. Other times it seems like there's nothing you can do but repeat the same race, ad nauseam, until you somehow get lucky enough to stay on course long enough not to lose.