Drift Mania Championship

Drift Mania Championship has managed the impossible, usurping idiotic rev-fest The Fast and the Furious: Toyko Drift by distilling its essence and injecting it with turbo fuel. It's pretty to look at, but crap to drive - a shallow racer through and through.

Astonishing as it may seem, Ratrod Studios has found a way to make drift racing even more unappealing than F&F. After spending hours with this game, the very thought of a drift racing on an iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad makes me retch.

Instead of offering fun, Drift Mania Championship infuriates with poorly designed controls and underwhelms with a paltry selection of vehicles and venues.

Tilt steering and touch velocity controls combine for an aggravating experience.

As expected, tilting your device moves your vehicle, and you're able to drift by banking hard in one direction. Applying the handbrake - designated by an icon in the lower-left corner - helps when drifting through tight turns.

Despite sounding intuitive, using the accelerometer to drift is surprisingly difficult. It might be manageable in Need for Speed: Shift, where drifting is used now-and-then in a race, but in Drift Mania Championship, where it's the sole objective, it's frustrating.

Expect hours of practice before coming close to a respectable performance. Most of the time you feel as though you're winging it down the track, sliding from one wall to the next.

Steering difficulties are made worse by a bizarre velocity management scheme. Rather than automating acceleration or tying it to a virtual button, speed is dictated by a vertical gauge that runs on the right side of the screen.

Tapping on the gauge moves your vehicle forward. The higher up the gauge you tap the faster you move. Oddly, there's no slider for setting cruise, so you're forced to constantly move your finger in order to manage your speed.

Not only is it frustratingly unintuitive, but it complicates the game needlessly. Drifting is hard enough without having to deal with a ridiculous speed slider.

The basic driving mechanics are so unwieldy that the game's underwhelming selection of modes, vehicles, and venues are hardly worth criticising. After all, why kick a drift racer when he's down?

At least Drift Mania Championship looks nice. The graphics are surprisingly good in spite of the horrible gameplay. Realistic tracks, detailed cars - it's a thing of visual quality. On iPad, the graphics are equally as good. However, the menus haven't been appropriately rendered and appear pixelated and slightly blurry.

The soundtrack, however, will make you forget any positive impressions of the graphics. Ranging from generic nu-metal to screeching emo-pop, all of it will make your ears bleed.

Clearly much effort has been invested into making Drift Mania Championship look good. If only as much effort had gone into making its gameplay match.