Racing Games

One-thumb racing games for real journeys

A racing game on a phone has a problem that a racing game on a console does not: the player is often standing up, holding a bag, or wedged into a train seat. Our racing line-up is chosen around that reality. Everything here can be played with one thumb, in portrait, at arm's length.

That constraint turns out to make the genre better rather than worse. Strip away the wheel, the gearbox and the camera controls, and what remains is the part that always mattered — reading the road and choosing your line a fraction of a second before you need it.

Three ways to drive with one finger

• Lane switching — you tap left or right to change lane and the car steers itself. Best for traffic-dodging games, and the easiest control scheme to learn.
• Steering by tilt — where supported, tilting the phone turns the wheel. Feels natural, but needs a reasonably stable grip on the phone.
• Hold and release — hold the screen to accelerate, let go to brake into a corner. The simplest scheme for a single-car time trial.

The habits that make you faster

Look further down the road than feels comfortable. Newer players watch the bonnet of their car; faster players watch where they will be in two seconds. Anticipate rather than react: if you wait until the obstacle is close, every correction becomes a panic move and a panic move is a crash. And accept the first lap as a scouting lap — many racers are won by learning the pattern rather than by being brave on the first attempt.

Data, battery and heat

These games are deliberately light. A typical session uses a few hundred kilobytes of data at most, and because the graphics are drawn rather than streamed, the phone stays cooler than it would in a heavy 3D racer. If your phone does warm up, lower the screen brightness rather than blaming the game; brightness almost always costs more battery than gameplay.

Frequently asked questions