Grind

There has yet to be a skateboarding game that comes close to the sensation of pavement surfing. The tilt and touch controls available to Grind make you dare to hope that the time has come, but these dreams are quickly dashed against a well-scuffed concrete floor.

To be fair, Grind sets itself a mammoth task that even the consoles struggle to live up to. A skateboard only really needs wheels, a piece of wood, a ramp, and an idiot willing to put the components together, and it’s in this latter respect that the concept generally fails.

Falling off doesn’t matter and Grind makes little headway in providing the incentive to keep your skater vertical.

The skate park in which the game is set is also rather small and limiting. It’s decked out with a good supply of trick opportunities, though the structure of the game has you seizing them rarely.

The opposing half-pipe ramps, rails and jumps do make for a tight course, though a bit of exploration while hunting for these stunts would have done the game more than a few favours.

It’s a simple objective in Grind: you get two minutes to rack up the highest score possible. Points are awarded for jumps and tricks, which are performed simply by pressing the ‘1’ and ’2’ buttons printed on the screen. Holding ‘1’ makes your skater grab his board at the front, while ‘2’ makes him grab the back.

Tilting the handset steers your wheeled warrior, but also spins him round when in the air - a stunt that’s very difficult to master. More often than not you won’t be holding the handset perfectly level when hitting a ramp, so regardless of the quality of your trick the chances are you won’t land straight enough to stay upright.

This does add a fair amount of skill requirement to Grind, which isn't a bad thing, but compared to the ease with which you can coast around the rest of the park it seems disproportionately arduous.

One thing Grind definitely has going for it is game speed. The skater cruises around the concrete very smoothly and the rag doll physics when he touches any obstacle are mightily entertaining.

Unfortunately, the tedium of pulling tricks means that you find yourself going for more adventurous ways to send the skater tumbling, rather than protecting his delicate bones and achieving high scores.

A small saving grace is the skate park construction kit, which presents you with a blank canvas where you can lay out whatever arrangement of tricks you like. Although it’s all still confined to a square patch of completely flat ground and flipping through menus is laborious, building a pathway of tricks and stunts from the starting point is quite entertaining.

Grind mostly comes down to a basic demonstration of rag doll physics and a crude, but slick-moving 3D skating showcase. Sadly, playability isn’t really at the core of Grind and presentation is sorely lacking. If nothing else, it proves that a good skating game is possible on iPhone. But this really isn’t it.