TV game show licenses have been ripping up the mobile charts for a long time now, so it’s easy to see why developers are scouring the channels for potential partners to bring to the micro-screen.
Top Gear is an unexpected bedfellow for Gameloft, however, since this is more of a magazine show than any kind of quantifiable point-scoring contest. Extracting a playable essence from a news and reviews program – even one as diverse as Top Gear – is a mighty task. The effort that’s gone into crafting a contest from the show’s passive remit is definitely visible in Gameloft's Top Gear, but so is its existence as a mish-mash of unrelated mini-games.
All this conspires to make Top Gear: The Mobile Game easy to like but very difficult to love - not least of all because of the well-jowled visage of Jeremy Clarkson popping up every few minutes to remind you how rubbish you are.
It does highlight one small, potential gap in the market, and that’s the racing mini-game collective. We see platform, sports and puzzle mini-game compilations all the time - even cross-genre collectives of smaller games - but there’s a noticeable lack of this form of anthology in the driving game realm.
Top Gear makes a move toward filling that gap, but at times it forgets to make the mini-games that constitute it very fun. Consistency is the game's biggest issue.
The games range from following the driving path of a lead car to dropping buses from cranes onto a target and strapping cars to rockets and seeing how far you can shoot them.
The actual driving mechanics pale in comparison to many of the excellent dedicated racers we’ve seen on the platform lately, which isn’t entirely surprising as Top Gear’s resources are spread thinly by attempting to cater for the different types of gameplay included.
The responses of the car in the driving games makes cornering with any aptitude a matter of clairvoyance - you need to be pressing '4' or '6' before the corner actually makes it into the game’s field of view.
This also makes the ‘avoid the Apache gunship’s missile lock’ (eh?) mini-game something of a tedious exercise in weaving - slowly - around an empty road.
Some moments do manage to make light entertainment of the premise, such as power-sliding around corners for as long as possible, but there’s nothing in Top Gear that hasn’t been done better elsewhere.
The best mini-games tend to be the ones that don't involve driving at all: firing a shuttle with a car strapped to it or dropping a bus from a crane onto a target, for instance.
It's in this playful variety that the game scores points, even if the individual components are all done better in full games elsewhere.
Graphically it’s very much the same: at times there are brief glimpses of action worthy of a high speed chase around the circuit, only for the illusion to be shattered when the car hits a cone, stops dead, and turns onto its roof in a single frame of animation.
The TV program has engaged in similar events to those represented in the mobile game in an attempt to retain viewers, but viewers arguably want to see what the cars (not the presenters) are actually capable of.
This misguidedness runs through the mobile game, too, and even though there's fun to be had the obvious effort the developer has gone to gets a little bit lost in confused objectives.
Top Gear: The Mobile Game
If this slightly odd mini-game collection were a car, it would go reasonably reliable and get good fuel economy, but it would have to stay in the left hand lane to let the faster cars past
Spanner Spencer
Yes. Spanner's his real name, and he's already heard that joke you just thought of. Although Spanner's not very good, he's quite fast, and that seems to be enough to keep him in a regular supply of free games and away from the depressing world of real work.