Little Racers STREET

Little Racers Street bases its style on those old-school top-down racers and implements elements from modern racers which works extremely well. The small vehicles and the camera angle capture the spirit of classic games like Micro Machines and the car classes, upgrades and damage as seen in modern games like Forza help modernise an out-dated genre.

You start with a small amount of cash and your first action is to buy a class E car. From there, you can race against similar cars in order to start accumulating cash to upgrade your car or purchase new ones. Your car can take damage and a percentage of your winnings is taken from you as a penalty, much like in the Forza series. Also like Forza is the fact you can increase the difficulty which gives you a slight bonus multiplier to your cash earnings.

On the race selection screen, you are presented with several races to select based on the cars in your garage. There are loads of races to do and each one just takes a few minutes to play. This means it's easy to pick-up-and-play as well as playing for long periods.

The cars are given a class from A to E, and you start at the bottom, expanding your garage as you purchase cars, upgrade or win them. Cars have different engine/wheel configurations and are rated by four attributes; grip, power, turning, and nitro. Purchased cars are placed in your garage where you can paint them a different colour, upgrade them or sell them.

The courses take place in a large city so you will see familiar roads over time. The city is well-designed though, and is full of straights, tight corners, hair-pins, bumpy roads, short jumps, roundabouts and cross-roads. There races take place at night with a few weather conditions such as rain and snow which changes the car's grip on the road.

There is a list of challenges to complete which rewards you with cash bonuses or a free car. These challenges are mainly to win a certain amount of races in a specific class/car and its always a good idea to aim for these.

The controls are intuitive, you have accelerate, brake and a nitrous boost which refills over time. The cars slide around the corners. On the lower classes, you rarely need to brake due to the way sliding slows you down. There is a noticeable difference between cars, especially comparing cars between classes. I found on the higher classes, the difficulty ramps up because its hard to keep an eye on the map to be aware of upcoming corners whilst you are travelling at high speed. The computer does make mistakes but still provides fierce competition on the higher ranks. Damage is inevitable, partially due to human error and due to the fierce competition. The monetary penalty seems a bit on the harsh side, so often you will find money quite hard to come by.

There are a variety of camera angles to choose from. Most of the camera angles are set high so it plays like a top-down racer, but there is a camera angle set behind the car if you wish to play that way. The graphics are very good for a budget title.

The game is surprisingly cheap at five pounds. You would expect a short, simple game for that, and this is probably as good as you can get for the money. I managed to play for 10 hours and still had many challenges to complete. If you want a simple and fun racing game, then Little Racers Street is highly recommended.