Demolition Derby

At one end of the racing spectrum you've got Formula One with its high speeds, tarmacked tracks and highly tuned multi-million quid cars.

At the other end, you've got banger racing - knackered up shells of cars competing to be the last still standing and running in a dirt track of doom.

I'd hazard a guess that most people prefer watching the former - otherwise the BBC would be going live to county fairs in Pennsylvania rather than Brands Hatch on a Sunday afternoon.

However, when it comes to games, Formula One racing is often translated into something drier than Tennessee and - if you like a drink - about as much fun.

Banger racing might well come out on top here. Let's face it - who doesn't enjoy smashing the suspension out of cars in a fight to the death? Well, Glu will be hoping plenty of people as it releases Demolition Derby onto mobile phone.

The game consists of two events - the Derby Race and Figure 8. One has you flying around an arena trying to smash in all the other cars before they smash you in, and the other is a race to be first around a figure-of-8 course.

These two events can be played separately as one-off games, or you can choose to play the game's main mode - Race Night - which combines the two into a seven night event and chucks in some money to win, points to earn, car upgrades to fit and repairs to be carried out in between races.

Both events are similar in nearly every way. Your car's damage is shown in the bottom left of the screen on a diagram that pinpoints exactly which bits you should be worried about.

There are also collectable items that randomly appear to grant various abilities - like nitro, a shield to protect you from damage for a limited time, bombs that inflict extra damage on cars you smash into (or on yourself if you drive into a wall) and a spanner which fixes a certain amount of damage to your car.

So far so good, and things get even better when you check out the range of upgrades you can fit to your car. There's a spiky bumper for dishing out extra damage, rally tyres for more grip and a cage for added toughness, for instance.

Another innovative inclusion is the Repair screen in Race Night mode. In this, you earn minutes on the track that you can then spend on repairing your car.

Scroll through every part of your car and you can see which bits have been damaged in the previous race. Then you can decide whether to spend 15 minutes on fixing it or just go into the next race with messed up steering.

The thing is, though, it's hard to tell much difference between the handling of your car pre-fixing and post. The upgrades do add something, but that's mostly determined by the fact you damage other cars quicker and take less damage yourself.

The other problem with Demolition Derby is that, with only two events, it gets samey very quickly. While the game looks great and the top-down view works well, there's definitely a shelf life to driving randomly about smashing into other cars. Ours was about three days in to the seven day event.

It's a shame there's no Bluetooth multiplayer mode either, because this game would be a lot of fun against friends.

You might well make it through Race Night once, enjoy the increasing difficulty the game throws at you, buy all the car extras and enjoy daubing your banger with more colours than the Teletubbies' Tubbytronic Superdome.

But once will almost undoubtedly be enough, which makes this is a decent but sadly short-lived racing game.