Superbike World Championship 2007

Whenever you see a child tearing down the street on their bike, leaving a trail of fist-waving pensioners in their wake, you know they're really imagining that they are riding proud atop a snarling motorbike. The giveaway is usually when they start revving the handlebars and making 'vroom-vroom' noises.

Of course, once the youngsters actually grow up to an age when they can feasibly start riding a fully fledged motorcycle, the prospect of becoming pâté on the tarmac of a motorway is actually a little off-putting, and they therefore tend to settle for their uncle's old Nova instead.

Childhood fantasies might not quite make it into reality, then, but for most, the idea of speeding around on a motorbike still retains a daydream potential similar to being a member of the world's greatest rock band, playing in front of a baying crowd.

Superbike World Championship makes it possible to race along 12 tracks from around the globe. There are three main game modes, although each uses the same circuits. Career is the central part of the game, where you get to race through the tracks in the official order, upgrading your bike as you progress by using money from sponsors.

Arcade mode is similar, but here you have to finish in the first three positions to progress and there is no bike customisation. Quick Race, meanwhile, enables you to play any single track that has already been unlocked in Career mode.

Your point of view is from behind the bike and all the action takes place in 'glorious' 2D. We're far from 3D fascists here at Pocket Gamer – many of our favourite games are 2D – but the graphics here are distinctly dated, having nothing to differentiate themselves from what was possible four or five years ago.

The pervading musty whiff isn't helped by the fact that the horizon in the game is only about a third of the way up the display, meaning the majority of the screen is filled with little more than a speedometer and the sky.

Admittedly, Superbike World Championship 2007 does try to make its tracks look different by using different colours and background objects, but the overall sense of agedness wins out. To be clear, we're not talking about old-skool retro charm here, either – things just look and feel dated.

None of this matters if the game is absolutely rip-roaring fun to play, though, and one thing to be said about the racing on offer is that it's certainly capable of getting a bit of pace going.

Indeed, manage to reach around 250kph and the scenery whizzes past at warp speed rate. There's an argument that this sort of unrealistic velocity causes a kind of dissociation in chase-cam 2D racers such as this, especially since there isn't much in the way of road markings to translate the speed onto the road surface itself, but the game doesn't actually suffer from this too badly.

Alas, after this short run of praise Superbike World Championship falls off the bike again, only to ruin its leathers beyond repair.

The AI is terrible. Bizarrely, if you don't press the brake button at the start of a race, you'll actually run into the rider ahead of you and end up sat on the tarmac. Also, the other 15 riders take almost no notice of your position, and they'll gladly ram you up the exhaust rather than overtake, again causing you to fly off your bike.

Also, their changing speed in races is baffling. Often, you'll find yourself far ahead of the competition during the first lap, only to be soundly thrashed by all and sundry in the next lap. We can appreciate there is a great deal of overtaking in bike racing but this is a moot point, since your own bike doesn't ride in the same way at all. In short, the AI just feels broken.

Superbike World Championship 2007 is simply a long way behind its rivals. While the bike handling itself isn't too bad, and there's a decent amount of tracks and modes on offer, the dodgy AI and dated overall look severely deflate the game's potential.