Vektrax

When you have an itch to play football, a little backyard footie is just fine - trying for the World Cup isn't necessary. Vektrax is the backyard football of futuristic racers: fun, fast, and totally casual. While it has the potential to be something much more substantial, it's a great arcade racer.

Piloting a small gravity racer, Vektrax has you zipping through checkpoints to beat the clock. There's no finish line - just a race against time with each checkpoint adding precious few seconds. Enemies milling about the enclosed tracks force you to do more than just put the pedal to the metal, testing your reflexes in an effort to survive while maximising your velocity.

Naturally, speed is priority number one and you do this by boosting at every opportunity. Destroying enemies fills up your boosters, which is easy enough considering your ship automatically fires twin frontal lasers. All you need to do is position yourself in front of foes so as to blast them to bits. Tilting the handset allows you to steer and touching the screen triggers your boost.

The controls are simple and spot-on. Within seconds you're gliding past checkpoints using some of the finest motion controls of any iPhone title to date. Vektrax manages to outperform sleeker racers with perfectly tuned use of the accelerometer. There's no option to adjust the sensitivity, but it's an excusable omission considering it isn't needed.

Even with the superior controls giving you an advantage, darting past enemies is a real challenge. Your ship comes equipped with a shield that degrades each time you're fired upon or run into an enemy. Obviously, the objective is to avoid direct collisions and, better yet, destroy opponents; however, this becomes increasingly difficult the farther into the game you travel. Early checkpoints feature a few widely-spaced apart enemies that band together in later stages. Additionally, tougher vessels appear more frequently later on.

Vektrax therefore becomes a balancing act. Moving as fast as possible can only be done by obliterating enemies and amassing boost. Since your boosters drain quickly, you're constantly on the prowl for more enemies to destroy.

Unfortunately, there's not much more to it than that. The game is woefully deficient when it comes to features, providing one mode of play and few options. High scores are kept locally for each of the game's difficulty levels - easy, normal, and hard - but online rankings would be ideal. Throwing in a survival mode concentrating on combat alone or a speed run without any enemies could have done much to round out the package, yet none of that is here.

And that's fine because Vektrax is meant for quick entertainment, not an epic racing career. The fact that you end up wanting more from the game signifies that it's an enjoyable rush.