Project Gotham Racing (Symbian)

Symbian games are going to be bigger news this year. By which we mean you'll actually be able to buy some from your mobile operator.

There are plenty of advantages, too. Symbian games use the native power of your phone's hardware, so say hello to proper 3D visuals, better sound, and a richer gaming experience all round.

That's the theory, anyway. You can check if your phone runs Symbian with this list.

Gameloft has already released several Symbian games, and EA Mobile is also working on its first titles. And now Glu Mobile is joining the party with a revamped version of its Project Gotham Racing, which came out in a Java version just before Christmas.

The core of the game remains the same. You drive a variety of fast cars round tracks in real-world cities, completing a series of challenges to unlock new courses. Earning credits along the way can be used to buy new and better cars to power you through the latter stages – or return to previous challenges to beat your best efforts.

You're still rated for style as well as speed, too, earning 'kudos' for drifting round corners, leaving the ground, overtaking other cars and completing sections of track without crashing into anything.

But really, Project Gotham Racing's Symbian incarnation is all about the graphics. Check out the static screenshots above: it sets new standards for mobile racing games. However, there is a problem: when they're actually in motion, there's a huge amount of pop-up.

What's pop-up? It's when you can see the scenery and buildings being drawn ahead of you, making them seemingly pop up out of nowhere. While this happened a bit in the Java version of Project Gotham Racing, it's far more evident in this new Symbian version, to the extent that it negatively affects the gameplay (certainly on our test handsets, including a Nokia N73).

If buildings appearing out of nowhere wasn't distracting enough, sometimes sharp corners do too, giving you little time to brake and get round them without banging into a wall. While there is a little map indicator in the bottom corner of the screen that helps you anticipate these, it's not ideal.

The result feels like the developers have been over-ambitious, trying to get phones to crunch graphics that their processors aren't quite up to. It's certainly something to be wary of.

Elsewhere, the game has some great features. For starters, you're not just restricted to London, Paris and San Francisco as in the Java game. There are now two additional locations: Cairo and Beijing, adding welcome variety. The sound is great, too, especially the screeching as you drift around corners.

We're also tickled by the Speed Camera challenge, which has you trying to reach a set top speed before the finishing line. Other challenges are similar to the Java game, being a mix of straight racing, time trials, drift challenges (where you have to rack up a certain amount of kudos), and overtaking, all of which will be familiar to anyone who's played the Xbox versions of the game.

Weirdly, the game has lost its online high-score tables since the Java version, which is a shame, as that's what kept us glued to the original game over the Christmas holidays.

Utimately, though, whether you go ape for Project Gotham Racing in Symbian format will depend on whether you can put up with that pop-up. If you can, there's a great game to be unlocked, and one that shows off the potential of Symbian handsets. However, strange though it sounds, we're still erring towards the original Java version, despite its fewer locations.