In the video for the Beastie Boys song "Sabotage," there is a slow motion shot of a 1970's vintage V8 powerhouse cop car launching off the top of a hill. There is something about watching a couple tons of metal flying through the air that gives you a feel of what true insanely used power is. Now imagine a ten-ton tank doing the same thing. Nice, eh? Now imagine forty different ten-ton tanks doing the same thing while firing at each other and running a racetrack. That is "Tread Marks," Longbow Digital Arts' upcoming tank racing game.

We managed to get a hold of an early copy of Tread Marks and took it for a spin. We really like what we found. Tread Marks currently uses OpenGL for its main API which means that if your card manufacturer doesn't support OpenGL, you'll be kicking and screaming (though this could change before release). In describing their engine, they put it best: "the terrain engine is a binary-triangle tree based dynamic view dependent Level of Detail height field renderer." Basically, that means it looks cool and does really nifty things. The hot feature of Tread Marks, beyond the fun concept, is a fully deformable, and reformable, terrain environment.

In previous games, when you fire a weapon at the ground, there is either no effect or at most a drawn bullet hole appears. That little two dimensional drawing then disappears after a short while so as to not slow down the game. When you fire a sabot at the ground in Tread Marks, you leave a permanent crater. You can dig trenches, level hills, and trip up an opponent all without having your previous destructive masterpieces disappearing or having a frame rate slow down. We actually tested this with a little bit of tweaking on weapon power. We managed to destroy the entire game arena down to a non-destructible base level. If anything the frame rate got faster.