Previews

Slot Racers

Relive those Sunday afternoons sprawled on the living room floor, all without resultant dents in the skirting board

Slot Racers
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| Slot Racers

We’ve no doubt that many of you reading this have fond memories of Scalextrix and slot car racing; you’d spend hours concocting a fiendish race track, spend another hour making sure that all the electrical connections between the pieces of track worked and then you’d play with it for ten minutes and forget about it until your mum shouted at you to pack it away. Ah, great days...

So we were excited to hear that Infospace has released Slot Racers, a game that brings all the thrills and spills of model car racing to your mobile phone. It’s not as strange an idea as it seems; it certainly sets it apart from all the other racing games out there and has some novel features that sound very entertaining indeed.

Along with the nine circuits that are set in three differently-themed areas, you can create your own slot racer track and challenge your friends to a head-to-head race. With a wide and infinite selection of track pieces at your disposal, the age-old problem of running out of corners is a thing of the past. Chicanes, cross-overs and hairpin corners add plenty of challenge A variety of race modes is open to you if you don’t have time to be a track architect at the same time and include one-off races and a full championship mode with bonus cars to buy with your cash winnings.

The controls are as simple and straightforward as the real thing. By pressing 5 you speed your car up and when you lift off, it slows down. Like the modern slot car sets you can change lanes – essential for overtaking – by pressing 4 and 6 or left and right on your phone’s thumbstick. Of course, take a corner too fast and you’ll face the familiar consequence of spinning off the track, though without the collision into an undoubtedly expensive and/or antique furniture! Maybe the obstacle-course style clamber over the track to put your car back on is being saved for the sequel as here you’ll be magically replaced. Race on!