Rayman Kart

We try not to burble on about console games in our mobile reviews, but in certain cases it's near-unavoidable. Such as kart games, for example.

Whenever you play a game featuring colourful characters racing round courses firing weapons at each other, the great big elephant on the track is Nintendo's Mario Kart. It's pretty much defined the genre, however hard developers try to escape its moustachioed embrace.

So to Rayman Kart. It's basically Mario Kart except with Rayman and his mates. Who if you haven't met them before, have featured in a series of platform games on mobile, most recently Rayman Raving Rabbids.

Rayman hasn't got any limbs, just floating hands and feet, which is why us games journalists give free rein to the legless and 'armless puns while writing about him. Celebrity journalists feel the same way about Heather Mills...

So, Rayman Kart won't win any prizes for originality. But that doesn't matter: it's by far the best karting game available on mobile.

There are six playable characters: Rayman, Globox, Moodblaster, Razorbeard, Teensie King and Mr. Rabbid (you'll recognise them from other Rayman games, if you're a fan).

Each has its own special weapon, which can be gathered from boxes littering the game's tracks. So Moodblaster can steal special bonuses from other players, Mr. Rabbid can turn everyone else into slow bunnies, Teensie King can warp himself to first place, and Rayman? Well, he's got a really big fist. Don't ask.

There's also generic weapons to pick up, like boxing gloves that rotate around your kart, a nuke that blows up the current race leader, and turbo boosts. The power-ups have a big impact on who wins the six-car races, which can sometimes been frustrating (translation: you occasionally get nuked metres before the finishing line and then everyone passes you), but adds to the knockabout fun.

The visuals are pretty good, veering towards the cartoonish, with varied tracks to race on. And the controls work well too, with your car auto-accelerating, so you just steer left and right, use '1' and '3' to power-slide, '2' to jump, and '5' to fire a weapon. Cars bounce off each other like dodgems, but you rarely find yourself struggling to stay on the track.

But it's the game's structure that really makes Rayman Kart. In the Arcade mode, you work your way through the different tracks, taking on four challenges in each: an easy and hard race, a time trial and a collection race.

Success earns you lums (aka money), and as you earn more, you unlock new tracks, characters, challenges, cups and vehicles (each character has a choice of several, each with ratings for speed, weight and luck). Gameloft's designers have got the progression just right, too, so you'll unlock new stuff regularly enough to never feel stuck on a particular race, keeping your interest levels up.

All this, plus a Cup mode with three trophies to compete in and a Single Race mode to take your pick of tracks.

Yes, Nintendo purists can probably pick out 234 ways in which Rayman Kart doesn't measure up to, say, Mario Kart DS. But we're talking mobile games here, and Rayman Kart is head and shoulders (but not neck, obviously) above the competition.