Slot Racers

We all have fond memories of slot car racing in our youth, and rightly so. Nothing else quite compares to the tactile fascination of slowly edging up the speed as you propel your miniature racing cars around a circuit of your own fiendish design. However, as anyone who's tried to revive the hobby in later life will discover, the fun wasn't unconditional. For starters, you had to spend hours clipping the track together. This was a challenge at the best of times, and was made harder if you wanted something more adventurous than the 3 or so tracks suggested on the box; even with plastic strained to its limits there never seemed to be quite enough pieces. Then, when you'd finally plugged everything in, warmed up the cars and ironed out that dodgy piece of dead track, there's the not insubstantial issue of rules to consider. What should actually happen when your opponent goes off the track? Should you stop straight away, should you have 2 seconds racing grace or should you run the gauntlet of having drivers sprint across the track to replace their derailed car?

Slot Racers promises to solve all of these problems, as well as negating the need to lump a huge box of kit around, by squashing the joyous racing experience into your mobile phone. And, by and large, it does a pretty good job. The one-button control system is immediately intuitive with an onscreen power bar increasing the longer you hold down '5'. As with the real thing you can afford to keep the power on full as you blast down long straights, while you’ll need to ease off for the corners and chicanes if you're to avoid spinning off (which here results in a minor delay as your competitors head off into the sunset). The latter will happen frequently at first, but as you get to grips with the knack of keeping the bar below a certain point around corners and tapping rather than holding down the power button, you'll begin to feel more confident and start to work out a racing strategy to deal with each track.

Presentation is friendly and functional rather than awe-inspiring, although there are some nice touches in the background such as birds and helicopters flying around and each track has its own identity. For example, European events are surrounded by lush green fields while those set in America involve dense cityscapes.

With 9 unlockable tracks to chose from, spread across Europe, America and Asia, and a choice of 3 vehicles, each with distinct handling, acceleration and top speed, there's quite a lot to master. Although the European circuits can be conquered relatively easily, America and Asia pose a much greater challenge. The ability to design your own circuits via a relatively simple track editor adds considerable longevity, as does the turn-based multiplayer option that enables you to take on a friend on a single phone. The lack of a Bluetooth option for proper multiplayer gaming is perplexing, but does ensure that the dodgy collision detection (i.e. when you hit another car), which is the game’s major failing, isn’t made worse than it already is. Our complaint here isn't that you can drive through opponents' cars as if they weren’t there, but rather that there are clearly some occasions (usually on corners) when the cars become seemingly more 'solid' and can somehow push each other off the track. As well as pretty much negating the game’s neat ability to let you change lanes at will, this fault serves to undermine both the well-balanced AI levels of opponents and the vehicles' general feel of weight and solidity. Whilst it's by no means sufficient to ruin the game completely, it is enough to earn a stop-go penalty from us and thus keep Slot Racers off the podium.