Screamer: there's lots to like about this driving game, however...

There’s a lot to like about Screamer. Inspired by classic Japanese anime movies, including the phenomenal Redline, it’s set in a neon soaked vision of the future where the cars all look like the result of a dawn raid on the Liberty Walk parts bin.

There’s a pleasing complexity to the action, seeing you balancing offensive and defensive resources, and an expansive story mode encompassing a huge number of circuits.

Unfortunately, the one thing to dislike is a biggie. Inexplicably, Screamer puts the drift trigger on a separate stick from steering, in defiance of racing game nature. This bizarre control scheme adds nothing, except the probability that you’ll spend your race pinballing embarrassingly off the barriers.

The question is whether Screamer is good enough to be worth suppressing every driving instinct and attempting to unlearn decades of muscle memory, just to master the drifting. And the heartbreaking answer is: almost, but not quite...

£50, PlayStation/Xbox/PC