Colin Mcrae Rally 04

The chances of creating a faithful version of the super-realistic 3D rally sim Colin Mcrae series on a humble phone may seem about as good as Colin himself winning the world rally championship (for non-fans, he’s not even competing!)

However, on first glance at least, it looks like the Codies have somehow managed to pull it off, transmitting the spirit of the PC and console classic into our Sony Ericsson. Presentation of menus and options is near identical to it’s bigger siblings and there’s a genuine feel for speed as you hurtle around the smart-looking isometric course, steering and breaking (your motor automatically accelerates). You’ll doubtless feel a few familiar moments of powersliding panic too, in an ‘oh my god look out for that tree!’ sort of way and whilst the controls maybe more Supersprint than super-realistic, they do work well on most handsets giving you a warm feeling when your clever breaking cut a corner in half and shaved of a few more precious seconds. Heck, Synergenix have even added in some anal technical detail with the ability to fiddle with the setup of your rally car in the latter stages and the addition of damage which effects performance if you ram into the scenery too frequently.

Where the game ultimately breaks down however is the over-revving of another feature from the Codies console game series, namely the difficulty level. What seems a tough but fair challenge in your first five attempts at stage one becomes a stupidly frustrating game mechanic 10 tries later. All but the most accomplished phone gamers are likely to trace the same arc of elation at finally edging onto the leaderboard, shortly followed by the intense deflation when you realise you have to win each stage to continue. Not only is this frustrating mode of progression exceptionally unrealistic and prohibitive to progress, it also renders the idea of damage and setup ultimately pointless (simply brush the scenery and you might as well press restart) robbing most of the chance to even sample the extra cars awarded at the end of a successful rally.