Cocoto Kart Racer

They say that imitation is the highest form of flattery. If so, Cocoto Kart Racer – with its jumping carts, jump starts, cartoon power-ups, and character-based racing – positively fawns over Mario Kart.

The object is to obtain a sacred pot by winning three karting tournaments: one set near a volcano, one set in an abyss, and one set in Atlantis. Each tournament comprises three tracks, so there are nine in all, and unless there's something medically wrong with your thumbs you should be able to rattle the whole thing off during your lunch hour.

You have the choice of four drivers: Cocoto, Shiny, Bo-Bong and Zaron. Each of these boasts a differing degree of acceleration, traction, and speed. You can't customise the amounts, so you have to choose the driver who best suits your style and stick with him. Cocoto is the everyman – the Mario – with his skills distributed evenly across the three categories.

At the beginning of a race, you can give yourself a boost by timing your ignition. Once moving, you can collect power-ups to inflict on your opponents, amongst which are a ball that you fire ahead of you, an obstacle that you leave behind you on the track, a ring of balls that gird your cart, and a flash of lightning that shrinks your opponents and sends them spinning.

Ranged along the track at fairly regular intervals are yellow rings that give your driver a small boost of speed. The only way to reach them is to jump, and the incentive to collect them frequently sends you careening away from the natural racing line. As well as these, there are red rings that suspend your cart above the track for a little while, enabling you to hover across hazards and enjoy temporary immunity from lightning strikes.

If Cocoto Kart Racer were Brighton rock, you could snap it in half and read the words 'copyright Nintendo' all the way through. It may seem unfair to judge a game by holding it up against a classic like Mario Kart and counting the differences, but by so comprehensively mimicking Nintendo's masterpiece, Cocoto has invited the comparison.

Unsurprisingly, it comes off worse.

Whereas the races of Mario Kart and its better imitators take place on a 3D circuit populated by features and landmarks, Cocoto's roads are of the old-fashioned kind. The tarmac tapers two-dimensionally towards a static horizon, snaking and swerving so that you never get the pleasure of jamming your thumb on the brakes and screeching round a tight bend, or pulling triumphantly away from a rambling pack.

There are some perfectly rectangular pools of water and blank white walls, but otherwise the world is largely void of obstacles. The details that populate the roadsides and fill the backdrops are imaginative and well-drawn, but they're also repetitive and add nothing to the minimal sense of progress and momentum.

Really, though, this is a small flaw. If we switch lenses and look at Cocoto Kart Racer in its own right – on a mobile phone that doesn't actually boast Mario Kart, after all – the lack of true 3D is far less damaging, and there's plenty to make up for its minor shortcomings. The racing is often frantic and well balanced, if a little easy, and the game does enough to make the brief period between booting it up and completing it a fairly enjoyable ride.