Raging Thunder 2

You can’t swing a wild fox around these days without hitting an outlandish arcade racer.

These games, like the metaphor just deployed, tend to make no sense in simulation terms, with outlandish boosts, wild pickups, and optionally realistic handling.

Raging Thunder 2 is an arcade racer, meaning it's ludicrous, unrealistic, and over-the-top. But that's just fine.

A la mode

There are a slew of game modes to choose from – Time Attack, Survival, Instant Race, Single Race – though many of the tracks need to be unlocked in either of the game's main modes - Arcade and Career.

In Career mode you get the option to buy new cars and upgrades as you go along by collecting money spread out along the tracks.

Meanwhile, Arcade mode puts you up against a timer in each race, meaning you have to collect the extra seconds that are scattered around or tackle your opponents for some added time.

This rough-housing between cars is what makes up the game’s arcade formula, and it's helped no end by Xperia Play’s physical controls.

You accelerate automatically and use the D-pad to steer and shunt the competition aside, as in games like Asphalt. But instead of crashing dramatically or bursting into flames, cars simply spin out and then regain control shortly afterwards in a penalty that has more in common with Mario Kart.

Ease out

This horseplay will only get you so far, however, as the main goal is to collect as many of the speed boost pick-ups as possible, thus depriving any competitors who are immediately behind you. This is how to stay in the lead, but thanks to the odd track twist, oil slick, frozen patch, or missed shortcut you can still find yourself drifting behind the others.

But not very often. If there’s one respect in which Raging Thunder 2 differs from its predecessors, it’s that it's much, much easier.

Only in more difficult and windy tracks do the other cars pose a real threat to your lead, especially since it only takes a few levels of Career mode to work up enough money to buy a super-fast car with all the best upgrades. This lack of a challenge can make the game grow almost as wearisome as the in-game music (well, not that bad – the in-game music is atrocious). It also means you burn through the main modes pretty quickly.

But this shouldn't put you off. The main issue for Raging Thunder 2 is that it's up against a lot of other titles in the same genre, like .

Raging Thunder 2 stands up well to its Android Market rivals - Asphalt 5 and Fast & Furious 5 - so if you've had your fill of those it's well worth checking out.