And of course Tread Marks has¼TREAD MARKS! Yes, when you drive your tank over a patch of ground, you leave tread marks! Amazing! The cool thing is that, just like the craters from cannon fire, tread marks are permanent. As the race goes on, the path becomes darker and darker as it gets churned up by passing tanks.

The terrain of Tread Marks is very nice looking and smooth. It has an organic feel, more like the real world than most terrain engines. They use a system where the same land is infinitely tiled in every direction. If you head one way for far enough, you'll come to an exact replica of the current state of the racetrack including all deformations. Explosions provide 100 per cent satisfaction. The only thing that does not look good is the water, which is just a different non-deformable texture on the ground. But this is an early version, and even if they leave water the same, it doesn't noticeably detract from anything. Longbow Digital Arts is doing fantastically well since this is only an early version of the game. And through it all, frame rates remained good, even with forty tanks playing.

The game play and control of Tread Marks are excellent as well. Control just feels right. It is realistic enough not to be annoying, yet realism is discarded when it gets in the way of fun. Like a cat, your tank will always land on its treads. Realism? Pshaw! It's a tank racing game for crying out loud! If you're one of those masochists who desire realism, buy something boring like a Peugeot. And if you want crappy control, we've got a real loser for you called Wargasm. Great job Longbow Digital Arts!

The concept of the release we saw was straightforward. You drive around one of several tracks and try to win the race. You are armed with a tank cannon, which you can use to both knock your opponents about and blow holes in the terrain to slow them down. It's really simple and a total blast. We lust for Tread Marks networkable future. We can't say much about the game play though, because at this stage it is limited.

Plans for game play are not finalized, but it appears that there will be various forms of racing in addition to multi-player death matches and capture the flag games. Longbow Digital Arts expects to add multiple kinds of weapons and power-ups to the race as well. We would love to see purses for each race, which allow you to purchase power-ups for your tank, and maybe even new and better tanks. There are a million possibilities for Tread Marks and they all rest on the strong foundation Longbow Digital Arts has already built.