Dakar 2007

It's easy to tell how serious a mobile racing game is. Seriousness is directly related to the camera's distance from the car. Games that see you fly high above the action like a kite in the wind may as well have the word 'arcadey' in their titles. They're the equivalent of rolling toy cars over a rug while making screeching noises.

Games that pull you along behind the car like a windsurfer are slightly more serious, but you don't have the advantage of the long view in real life and power-slides on real roads aren't nearly as effective as these skidfests suggest.

Then, at the darkest end of the driving spectrum, there are games like Dakar 2007, which place you right inside the car, reduce your view to a letterbox, forcing your hands onto the steering wheel, and try to make you drive properly.

To be fair, driving properly in Dakar 2007 isn't as much of a dark experience as it sounds. The simulation element is limited to braking when you turn a sharp corner, which is a rare requirement on a mobile handset because of the complex thumb-dance that braking entails. Other than that, you're free to drive as fast as the auto-accelerate will let you. And that's pretty fast.

From the claustrophobic perspective of your cockpit, the scenery is restricted to a sliver of sky, a slice of land, and a ribbon of road, but what's there looks good and flows smoothly. The track has hills and dips as well as turns, and as you barrel along, it unravels at a giddying pace, with rocks and logs punctuating the surface and slowing you down if you have the misfortune to hit them.

Joining these obstacles are power-ups to repair and refuel your car. During the more difficult races, when you find yourself pinballing from rock to rock, collecting these becomes vitally important.

In the accustomed rally game style, your navigator is on hand to forewarn you of oncoming bends and forks in the road. Rather than describe these verbally, however, he projects symbols into your field of view. Arrows represent directions, with 'Up' signifying a jump, while forks in the road throw up two symbols: a wiggly line for the fast but tricky path or a straight one for the slow but safe one.

Befitting a title that dresses itself in the garb of simulation, the controls are more sophisticated than many mobile racing titles. While '5' brakes normally, '1', '3', '7', and '9' brake in the direction of their respective sides of the keypad, to give you added control whilst cornering. It's also possible to skid your car by tapping brake and then steering in a direction.

There are two game modes, Rally and Time Trial, with progress in the former unlocking tracks in the latter. Although this is a fairly meagre pair of modes – with nothing in the way of customisation or ride-pimping to add depth to the game – there's a princely total of 15 tracks, and visually they're quite distinct from one another.

Much of the Dakar rally (what used to be known as the Paris-Dakar rally) is an interminable race across a featureless desert, but developer Abylight spins variety from the landscape by sometimes rendering the sky blue, sometimes pink, and sometimes filled with billowing, oddly static clouds of dust.

The featurelessness of the real Dakar rally is reflected more problematically in other ways, however. You can drive all day and night, but you'll never find another car to race against. As realistic as this may be, the absence of opponents saps some of the urgency that Dakar 2007 could have contained were its dusty tracks populated by jostling automobiles.

Nevertheless, this is a solid enough game. The steering is responsive, there are plenty of tracks and the power-up system adds a pleasingly kart-ish dimension. The graphics are nicely drawn and well-animated, too, and the feeling of speed is palpable. Dakar 2007 is far from the best mobile racer, struggling as does to find a place in a field so rich in quality, but if you've exhausted the front runners, and are looking for a serious simulation rather than a powerslider, this is worth a look.