Amped

If you're lucky enough to have been snowboarding, you'll know that the first couple of days strapped to a plank can be painfully frustrating. And then, suddenly, like a dislocated knee it all clicks into place.

Amped is without doubt one of the best extreme sports titles yet to grace a mobile phone, but like the real-life pastime it represents, your introduction to the game can make you feel like your able mind has little control over your floundering limbs.

The controls you see, while very nicely applied to a numeric pad, require a certain deftness of touch most likely familiar to pianists, or those who solder microcircuits, meaning often the messages from head to hand get a little confused as you carve through the virtual piste.

The pleasure in playing any game of course comes from overcoming challenges, and when you finally develop a delicacy as light on the keys as a typist, you really are in for a treat.

It's rare that mobile releases feel like the 'fully-fledged' gaming experiences of home consoles, but Amped breaks that rule. It is stunning to look at, proving the worth of visual design alongside graphical power, and throughout it is very well put together and constantly defined by tidy production values.

The main Career mode offers you several mountains to conquer, each featuring various runs that increase in difficulty. To progress you must score set point totals, but extra challenges that pepper each route to focus your movement skills or ability with tricks add both variety and replay value.

Essentially, the game presents you with a snowy race way littered with jumps, rails and obstacles, and a fairly impressive catalogue of tricks, including 'butters', that are effectively the snowboarding version of the 'wheelie', enabling you to link huge combos together as you cruise from ramp to ramp.

Individual challenges, such as a coin collecting task that encourages you to develop your grinding skills, act as well disguised tutorials, doing something to smooth out what is otherwise a rather steep learning curve. Adding a snowy top layer of icing to Typhon's well prepared powdery goodness, a host of extras including stat points, costume customisation and achievement goals give the package a real feel of a full console release that you'd buy in a box off a shelf.

Most impressive of all, though, is the polished nature of the package as a whole, from the in-game animation to the responsive nature of the menus and the subtle but catchy musical backdrop. Amped reeks of quality, and it's a smell mobile gamers should be far more familiar with.

It is rather tricky, and the intricacy of control might cause larger thumbs problems, but if you've a taste for the piste without the bank balance to fund a lift-pass, this strong flavour of the extreme could be the perfect antidote to the English winter. For those longing for lush white snow and sun-kissed peaks, instead of greying skies and oily puddles, this could be just the escape they need.