Graphics: The visuals in this racer are nothing less than magnificent. Each new track leaves my mouth hanging open with wonder. The tripods are beautifully articulated and glisten as they move. Their rendering is quite convincing in creating vehicles that look three-dimensional and robust. The tracks contain incredible detail, with each segment full of unexpected visual touches. The track settings are replete with imaginative special effects, including great lighting and reflection effects. The racing environments are drawn so cleverly–with all the elements nicely integrated and fully consistent–that you feel totally absorbed in a completely separate imaginary world.

The range of graphics resolutions goes all the way from 320×200 to 1280×1024, allowing for a wide selection of computers to run the program effortlessly. Thanks to the superb rendering engine, I find that the animation is smooth on my machine at even the highest settings. No matter how many tripods are on the screen at one time, I never experience those annoying pauses or jerks that just ruin racing titles.

Interface: The controls are incredibly smooth and responsive. Although the steering wheel is fully supported (along with the keyboard of course), I actually prefer the gamepad given the frequency of sharp twists, turns, and dips. There is absolutely no latency between your tactile input and the changes in your tripod’s behavior on the tracks.

The menu screens are creative, but at the same time, confusing. You scroll down through a series of different menus, and then hit enter to select the set you want to deal with; unfortunately, it is quite easy to think you are choosing one set when in reality you are picking another. As is typical of internationally oriented titles, the menus and the printed manual documentation are available in multiple languages. The play screen is extremely well laid out and easy to interpret while racing. But you travel at such incredible speed that you rarely have time for more than a fleeting glance.

Gameplay: The tracks are the best designed of any racing title I have ever played. The downturns are so vertical, all other offering’s courses seem flat by comparison; going down the steeps felt just like Splash Mountain at Disneyland. The design of each track is so distinctive that you face a completely different set of challenges on each one.

Even though this is an arcade racer, the feeling of real-world racing physics, including friction, gravity, mass, velocity, and force, are uniformly excellent. The tripods are a bit like hockey pucks on ice–they instantaneously respond to physical forces in a way that regular cars never would. When you whip around corners at lightning speed, you can almost feel the pull. The collision detection is also outstanding.

Your success is a function of a combination of driving skills and battle strategy. The huge jumps require careful coordination, and the offensive pick-ups take quite a bit of skill given that you are virtually never entering a completely flat and level straightaway. Bumping into other tripods is quite common and very much a part of what is essential to get ahead.

Sound FX: When I first played Killer Loop, I was unnerved that there was no engine sound when the vehicles raced, but then I remembered that the magnetic charge system leads to silent running. The sounds you hear are largely the starting signal, a noise when you run over particle fields, and the thud when you run into a wall or another tripod. Sadly, there is no 3D hardware sound available.

Musical Score: Unlike the mediocre rock scores in so many racers, I just love the techno-rock soundtrack incorporated in Killer Loop. The music has a tune and a beat, is extremely exciting, and perfectly suits the mood of the gameplay. When racing with the music turned off, the experience is not nearly as fun. I would just love an audio CD of this soundtrack.

Intelligence & Difficulty: What I like about Killer Loop is that, even though all of the tracks are incredibly challenging, even a novice driver can do reasonably well because the controls are as smooth as silk. In other words, winning takes real skill, but this is not one of those titles where if you make one mistake, you are out of the running. Often the pickups that help you win are located on parts of each track that are far from the fastest line, so you have to be quite deft in making the needed adjustments with great precision.

The artificial intelligence of the computer-controlled tripods is outstanding. You may pass them with speed bursts aided by green particle field pickups, but you had better watch out for them to be passing you again if you make the slightest slip. They do not make it easy to zip by them, as they engage in intelligent blocking behavior. Moreover, their clever use of their own pickups is a sight to behold.

Overall: Killer Loop is without question the best arcade racer of 1999, and it is up there with Digital Illusion’s Motorhead and Beam Software’s Dethkarz as one of the best arcade racing titles of all time. It is too bad that there are no current plans to publish this offering in the U.S., but perhaps that will change as the good word spreads. If you are a true arcade-racing fan, you should snap this beauty up the first moment you have a chance.