This review was written by PN contributor, Heath M Shusterman-Zimmerman

Over Top is a racing game with a bird’s eye view. Players are racing against three other A.I controlled cars. It features four different modes: Japanese Original, English Original, High Score, and Caravan mode. To start, players are given a choice of vehicles each with a variety of colors, and different stats showing how well they handle on pavement, sand, dirt, and snow. The player can choose from the following vehicles: the Plot, F project f350, Drei-Stern AW600, AD Falcon 39, Asun Dominator, Craftwork akw.d12, Honma Safari 750, Ipac Dio Version R.

Japanese Original and English Original play the same, with the only noticeable difference being the presence of Japanese characters when displaying the vehicle’s color. High score mode is where players compete to the end of the track as fast as possible. When done, you can post your score to the online leaderboards. Caravan mode is high score mode, but with a time limit of only five minutes. After finishing, players are able to post their high scores to the online leaderboards.

Let the Race Begin: The gameplay is rather simple, using either the analog stick or the D-pad to move the car from lane to lane. Holding Y makes the car go forward, and B is the break. Tapping B twice allows for a drastic stop. To use the handbrake, players must hold both Y and B to do a drift. Using the drift can help you make sharp turns without losing too much speed if done right. If you are like me, you may just slam into a tree, wall, road cone, wooden barrier, or explosive barrel, but this is part of the fun. However, I am still trying to figure out why the streets are lined with barrels that explode.

Hitting a barrel, road cone, or wooden barrier won’t slow you down too much, but hitting a line of trees or a wall will. It may even cause your car to spin out of control or do a barrel roll. The goal of the game is to win the race. Each lap is a different part of the track- in the order of city, village, lakeside, mountain, desert, port town, and finally, park. After completing the course, you get a congratulations screen and then the credits roll followed by entering your initials for the best speed. There is no way to play a part of the race track without actually getting there first, which means if you want to race on the mountain you must race through the previous stages. Each lap has its own shortcut, which most of them I found while spinning out.

Overall, Over Top offers some classic racing gameplay that is fairly basic. There is no customizing the cars for better performance and no track selection. The game does not offer too high of a replay value due to the lack of race courses available. Players looking for a diverse racing game might want to skip this title. Players looking to set high scores to compete with family and friends might enjoy the game.