This is definitely not your typical racing game premise. It must be a gaming-first for a vengeful demon to shrink a party of teenagers and force them to race for their souls. Believe it or not, that’s the plot – we think you’ll agree it’s rather tenuous and aside from a handful of animated sequences, you’re very infrequently reminded of its irrelevance.

Konami’s Pocket Racers has an overwhelming amount of content; you can thank Micro Machines for that. It consists of three ‘soul challenges’, with five tracks to complete on each before you can move onto the next challenge. Choose your vehicle, complete with the usual array of speed and handling attributes, then race it across typical household venues such as messy bedrooms, bathrooms, kitchens and (of course) a conveyor-belt factory. Power-ups can be collected and various weapons employed to thwart your opponents around the course, in addition to the collection of soul shards used to augment vehicles. Central to the shaky storyline is the outcome of the race: achieve first or second place and win a couple of soul shards, third gets you nothing and last will lose you one of the available vehicles, representing one of your mate’s souls.

Plot aside, there’s nothing particularly original about Pocket Racers. It’s been done a million times before, a billion times better by the trillions of iterations of Micro Machines games that have preceded it. The only part it doesn’t rip off is the aerial view that moves with the lead vehicle, forcing tailing players to keep up in a desperate attempt to prevent them from falling off screen and be eliminated from the race. Incidentally, this is the by far best part of the game.

And as if it wasn’t enough to emulate everything except the fun part from one great racer, Pocket Racers also features a secret nitro boost available at the start of each race, activated by a correctly timed button press – unbelievably, it has the exact same timing as Super Mario Kart.

Pocket Racers entertained us for an hour or so before we lost interest, whereupon the gamer in us gave up and the journalist had to take over in the interests of professionalism. Having said that, if you’ve never played Micro Machines before and can convince your mates to buy Pocket Racers as well, you’ll find it a far less fleeting experience. But hold on to that £29.99 if you’re just looking for a game to fill the hole Micro Machines left in your life.

Ben Biggs