Red Bull Air Race 3D

Red Bull gives you wings, or so goes its advertising slogan. Personally speaking, it gives me verbal diarrhoea, an inability to sleep and heart palpitations, but each to their own.

It's this advertising slogan that has led Red Bull to put its name to a real life air race - one that sees world class pilots pulling off low-level aerial tricks and slalom flying between floating pylons known as air gates. It's exciting stuff.

Red Bull Air Race 3D then, is the mobile game of this adrenaline surging sport. The key aspects of which we imagine - from our amateur perspective - would be precision and speed.

It's a shame then the game doesn't really do either with any degree of success.

You hardly get a sense of blasting through the skies in Air Race - more a sense that you're floating at indeterminable speed along a marked out path of red blobs.

And there's also very little in the way of precision. Using '4' and '6' you steer your plane left and right. However, the controls seem to have a mind of their own. Merely tapping left or right causes nothing to happen at all, while holding it down sends you into steep, practically 180 turn. The solution then, is to try to tap the buttons and inch your way through pylons - which is both inaccurate and about as realistic as the film Airplane's depiction of a Boeing 707's auto-pilot function.

What you want to be doing is sailing at speed around each of the game's courses and lining up perfect paths into each of the sets of pylons. What you end up doing is clumsily twitching your way around them with little in the way of finesse.

We'd say that this renders the game's replay function - where you can watch back a replay of your aerial acrobatics from different camera angles - largely useless. But the function would be pretty boring anyway, since the cameras are placed so far from the action you end up watching nothing for a few seconds before your speck of a plane comes into view.

So far, so negative. Although some credit to the game is due.

There are several play modes for instance - a season in which you compete against other pilots on a scoreboard for points and trophies, a Quick Play mode where you jump into a race, and Custom Flight, where you can choose the location and race type of your race, as well as whether you want the red dot path to show you the way through.

Personally, we'd say turn it off, since it makes the game look better and feels like it might even partly address the twitchy graphics and movement the game has a lot of.

However, not all of the game's problems are so easy to solve. Granted, Red Bull Air Race feels quite unique in that there aren't many games of its type on mobile. And there's plenty of challenge in passing through each set of pylons with your plane lined up correctly.

For some you need to be flying straight and horizontal. For others you need to be knifing - or flying sideways - to squeeze through. You can also perform a loop to turn around speedily. It's a game that requires concentration. Lose that and you'll lose the path completely. And there's some pleasure earned by winning a gold trophy in the Season races.

Unfortunately, it fails to shine either visually or in terms of its controls. It was a nice idea - but we'd rather stick to Red Bull wings of the caffeine-overload type than ever play this game again.