Grid Runners Neon

Grid Runners Neon nails the one thing an arcade racer needs: the sense of speed. The tracks are glowing ribbons through a synthwave city, and drifting around a corner just before boosting out of it never got old for me. Tilt or touch steering both work, and I ended up preferring the on-screen buttons.

There is a decent career mode, but the real fun is the thirty-second time trials. You beat your own ghost, shave off a tenth of a second, and suddenly it is twenty minutes later. The car handling is arcadey rather than realistic, which suits a phone perfectly.

My only gripe is that the later tracks reuse a lot of the same set pieces. Still, for pure pick-up-and-race fun, this is one of the better ones I have played this year.

What we liked

• Excellent sense of speed
• Bite-sized time trials
• Both control schemes feel good