Turbo: Super Stunt Squad

The "movie-game tie-in" klaxon is sounding, which can only mean one thing: you should be looking for the nearest exit.

Turbo: Super Stunt Squad for the Nintendo 3DS is a racing game based on the Ryan Reynolds animated film released earlier this year. I hear the film was a bit disappointing, and the game doesn't fare much better.

This is a classic example of a movie-game tie-in, with the bare minimum of content to play, awful level design, and racing mechanics that are incredibly half-baked.

You race around a small collection of tracks, each based on the Turbo movie in some way. The twist is that you're a snail with an engine on your back, and so are all of your competitors.

What makes Turbo a tad interesting is that as a snail you're able to squirm up walls and race without worrying about gravity, a la Mario Kart 8 on the Nintendo Wii U.

It's a neat idea that's barely exploited. Each track has one, maybe two sections that have you climbing the walls, and it's usually a simple U-bend or the like, lasting mere seconds before you land back onto the dull track.

Other than this one feature, Turbo is rather poorly designed. Snails handle like, well, more or less as you'd imagine a snail to handle. You can drift around corners, but you can't steer mid-drift.

Meanwhile, you can do tricks in the air by pressing the direction buttons, but much of the time you'll accidentally touch another snail in the air, and the game will kill you for it. Why wouldn't it?

You can acquire powers, such as boosting, by doing these air tricks - but none of the powers is particularly interesting. You can stack powers of the same kind, which is actually sort of clever - it's just a shame the idea isn't found in a more enjoyable game.

Elsewhere the track design is massively dull, collisions are not handled well at all, and the game just looks and sounds awful, with dialogue that's repeated endlessly.

Turbo: Super Stunt Squad is clearly aimed at kids, but it features no explanations whatsoever. I had to work out all the controls by randomly pressing buttons to see what they did, and the menu system doesn't tell you what you should be aiming for or how to unlock anything extra.

So I can't even recommend this mess of a game for children. There are games based on movie licences that aren't lazy cash-ins, but this, sadly, isn't one of them.