Lotus Challenge Slot Cars

The fascination with fast cars is imprinted on the male mind at an early age and never truly leaves, changing just in its scale. Whether it's slot cars on the living room carpet or high-performance sports cars on the racetrack, the resulting glazed-eye smile remains broadly the same. Hence, a mobile game which combines the childish pursuit with the grown-up car marque must surely be destined to spread joy across the face of every right-thinking man, child and quite possibly woman in the world...

Yet somehow, after twenty minutes of playing Lotus Challenge Slot Cars we're not smiling. Granted, there's been the odd flicker at the corner of our lips but these moments of pleasure have been far-outweighed by frustrated grimaces at what is, sadly, a rather flawed game.

Everything starts out well; the game puts you in control of a Lotus Elise that you must send hammering around a series of increasingly tortuous slot-car circuits as fast as possible, all the while keeping your wheels on the track. The visuals are sharp with some nice detail to both the car and environments (the former jolts convincingly from side to side and sparks as you apply power; the latter includes mobile phones on the floor of the office and socks in the bedroom) and the control system is intuitive. You control the car's acceleration by pressing and holding (or jabbing) '5' or the joypad button to simulate the slot-car trigger, with the duration of your press being indicated by a power bar at the base of the screen.

This works well, feeling slightly more responsive than other, similar titles, and enables you to control your pace into corners and gradually edge up the power as the laps progress. Aside from controlling speed you can also chose to swap which side of the track you're on in order to block or attempt to derail your opponent. This also works pretty well (the cars are thankfully far more solid than those in Infospace's Slot Racers), although the fact that you're only ever competing against one vehicle here renders this feature less important than it could have been.

There's a fair feeling of speed, too, although when you start the game it almost seems as if the racing is too fast for your phone as your car lurches painfully through the opening lap while the track is loaded (and it's not a handset glitch, either; the same thing happened on 3 different models in our test). While the racing experience does admittedly become much smoother and quite nippy after the first lap, further annoyance isn't far away.

The chief culprit here lies in the tracks themselves and, specifically, in the combinations of ridiculously unforgiving corners and irritating jumps. While the former can be dealt with as you learn the circuits and would be forgivable in themselves, their frequent proximity to jumps hugely upsets the pace of just about every track that features them. This ensures that these races are more a matter of luck than judgement and you'll spend most of your time spinning off the track.

Should you persist and manage to get past these obstacles then there are some neat (and fairer) challenges on offer amidst the 16 tracks, although with only 1 vehicle available (albeit one that you can improve as you go), no multiplayer options and little in the way of additional variety, it's unlikely that you'll persist too long. In many ways this is a shame as there are some nice ideas here, but sadly they are beset by a few annoying problems that let the whole game down.