Top Gear: Stunt School

We’ve come to accept many conventions about games based on other material over the years.

For example, action always trumps authenticity. That character in the second chapter - gone. How about that killer plot twist? Axed.

Top Gear: Stunt School manages to bottle some of the magic that made the show a worldwide phenomenon, taking a fresh approach to a tired genre that should have fans excited.

Unfortunately, this iOS debut is also a game that wouldn't be too far away from one of the programme's challenge cars: a wonky-looking construction that falls apart at the merest hint of James May.

Rather than focus on racing supercars around an old airfield, Top Gear: Stunt School focuses on two different aspects of the programme: crazy challenges and racing The Stig.

The former is split over 20 different levels, with a quartet of difficulty levels that put you in gradually harder to control vehicles.

The challenges are imaginative and in the spirit of the show. They vary from fairly normal-sounding objectives – like getting the longest jump off a ramp over rows of caravans - to strapping a bomb on the roof on an APC and taking it off-road.

The point of this gallivanting is to unlock parts to stick on your own custom car. Bizarre parts include sponge tires and radar dishes, with the final two difficulty levels reliant on a bit of tweaking to win.

Having created your contraption of terror, you can also challenge The Stig around the Top Gear track. It’s an interesting spin on the standard time trial format, but the excitement of seeing your own contraption being pushed to the limit is dulled somewhat by the blocky graphics and drab texturing.

The controls aren't perfect, either. Without an option to adjust the position of the virtual buttons, activating the special items on the car is awkward because they're placed at the wrong distance from the pedals.

No matter what you strap onto the machine, the driving itself feels lifeless, with little sense of speed and almost no difference in handling between a supercar and an economy model.

These control and graphics problems impact on the challenges themselves, making them less compelling despite the usually funny situations and fantastic blueprint-style intro to each one.

Keeping the aforementioned bomb on the car, for instance, is ridiculously easy as there doesn’t appear to be any physics at work – you hit a wall at 5MPH and it explodes, hit a bump at top speed and you’re fine.

It’s always refreshing to see a title based on a film or television show actually work the gameplay around the source material, but Top Gear: Stunt School needs to do a little more homework into the racing basics before it’s let out on track.