It was a wild race. My car wasn’t the fastest on the track, but thanks to some pretty slick driving — hey, it isn’t bragging when it’s true — I was holding my own. I had good position and there weren’t that many laps left. Not long before I would make my move. I was guiding my racecar down the outside of the lane, minding my own business. Suddenly some careless idiot blunders all the way across the track and sideswipes me, throwing me into a spin that ends with my car wrecked and me seriously ticked off.

No, I’m not Danica Patrick, but I feel her pain because that’s what happened to me playing Wild Gears the other day. Only after my racecar was totaled, it regenerated and instead of stalking down pit row looking like ten gallons of kick-tail in a one gallon jar, I took off after that sorry schmuck and returned the favor.

The latest release from mobile gaming powerhouse PDAmill, Wild Gears is a loving homage to retro RC racing games. I can’t remember that far back, but the four cartoony racers and 15 bright, whimsical courses did remind me of Mario Kart. There are even power-ups! A realistic driving simulation Wild Gears is not, but that’s not the point. What really matters is: is it fun? Read on to find out!

Getting To The Racetrack

PDAmill used to have a contorted (but understandable) policy of having completely separate trial and full versions of their games to defeat serial number cracks. Recently they switched to the familiar "we’ll send you a registration number when you buy, enter it to unlock the program" method. This makes installation as easy as apple pie.

My biggest complaint with Wild Gears is that it’s a massive resource hog. The 12.5 MB size of the program file practically mandates installation to the SD card. PDAmill’s other two newest games, Snails Reloaded and Pachinko Go!, come in around the 3-5 MB mark. Their last racing game, Flux Challenge, sported full 3D graphics and still weighed in at a mere 4.4 MB.

Okay, storage is cheap. But whatever is taking up all that hard drive space also eats RAM like Takeru Kobayashi tosses back hot dogs. The game occasionally locked up on me and forced me to soft reset. Sometimes I couldn’t even get it to launch. My Axim has about 30 MB after a soft reset and leaks down from there; I know there are devices whose memory situation is tighter than that. 

Once the game loads, the main menu appears. Sure, there are options and things, but in a racing game designed to be intuitive, you should be able to just hit "Start Game" and go.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Start Your Engines

Wild Gears features four different cars, each with its own strengths and weaknesses. Choosing the right car for the track is the first step to winning races.

Unfortunately, the specs for the cars are buried in "Information" off the Main Menu, and even the descriptions there are kind of vague. I’d rather see some sort of graphical overlay of the car’s properties right on the "Select Car" button to make it easier to figure out what I was getting.

Once the car is on the track, PDAmill has done a very good job of making each car handle uniquely and be fun to drive. They actually feel like they are different weights.

All four cars are available for driving from the first race. Although the descriptions call the Staghorn "great for beginners" and the Scarab "for advanced drivers only," I didn’t notice a lot of variation in the demands on my mad RC driving skillz. I did best on nearly every track with the zippy but grippy Sandbox, and while I got a sadistic kick out of lapping my competition, sometimes I wished for more of a need to mix up my strategy. I’d like to see more cars to unlock later, or at least special rewards for winning with different cars.

This Sure Beats An Asphalt Oval

The best part of Wild Gears isn’t the racing, it’s watching the scenery. The 15 beautifully detailed courses go from glaciers to volcanos, through castles and archaeological digs and, my visual favorite, a literal house of cards. Exploring through the tracks is so much fun, it’s easy to forget there’s a race to win.

At the beginning of the game, only one course is open. Two more can be unlocked by finishing anywhere but last. After that, things get a little tougher. The Wild Gears tracks are grouped into four cups: Beginner, Fantasy, Expedition, and Elemental. The Beginner Cup has three courses while the others have four. To unlock the Fantasy Cup, all a driver has to do is finish first in every race in the Beginner Cup. And so on. This is exactly as hard as it sounds. Definitely harder than finishing not last to open up the rest of the tracks in the new Cup.

Now seems like a good time to mention the game’s auto-save feature. For a game like this where failing to save after picking up the elusive win on Pepe’s Skyway would be pulling-out-hair frustrating, auto-save is a terrific convenience. Each time the game starts, all records and previous progress are there and ready to go.

Several of the tracks are Easter Eggs for longtime PDAmill fans. To name a couple, Arvale players will recognize Entoque Castle and have a pretty good idea of who’s running DM’s Digsite. These bits of gleefully shameless corporate synchronicity have been popping up in PDAmill’s games for a while now, and they work especially well in Wild Gears: creative scenery for newcomers, inside jokes for PDAmill veterans, and awesome racetracks for everyone.

Is That The Check Engine Light, Or Is My Trunk Open?

There are a limited number of ways to tell a teeny vehicle where to go on a Pocket PC. Usually they’re based around the center of the screen (or the d-pad): tap left, go left, etc. Instead, the control center for Wild Gears is the on-screen joystick down at the bottom of the screen.

Starting this race, intuition would say to tap at the tip of the gigantic yellow arrow. Intuition would be wrong. Driving a Wild Gears car is like trying to manipulate something with only a mirror to show you what you’re doing, or else patting your head and rubbing your stomach. It takes getting used to, but the concept feels sort of retro fun. On the other hand, the idea is for the stylus to stay in the little brownish circle of the joystick. I’m physically incapable of that kind of fine control, and since I had less screen to work with I had particular trouble dragging the joystick down.

That’s the round thing explained, but the joystick is not the only important item on the display. Starting at the top left, the big number is a position rank, while the little white number shows the current lap (but not the total laps in the race, which is usually 3 but varies). The green glowing car shape underneath them is a health meter. When it turns red, the car on the track is due to start smoking and disintegrate into a tiny fireball the next time it takes damage. The racecar regenerates, but in addition to the time lost it reappears farther back along the track.

Just to the right of the numerals are the current race time and the track record. Next to that is a bar speedometer which seems to be there out of a sense of obligation, not because it’s terribly helpful to see just how slowly you’re accelerating after doing a header into the wall. A pause button finishes out the top row.

At the bottom left is the Zoom button, which toggles between normal view and a zoomed-out view that shows just a little bit more of the track. A bigger difference would improve Zoom’s usefulness. The final indicator is the track overview at the bottom right, which shows the overall shape of the course and the positions of each car. It’s very handy for knowing when turns are coming up and whether another car is in position to pass or to be butted into flames. Since I (along with 85% of the population) am a righty, this crucial information would be easier to see in a spot where my hand didn’t tend to cover it, like the opposite side of the screen where the seldom-used Zoom button sits.

Fasten Your Seatbelt, We’re Off To The Races

Once the metaphorical flag waves, all’s fair in love, war, and Wild Gears. When the racing is tight, it’s like exploding bumper cars. Any driver good or lucky enough to gain some separation still has to deal with sharp curves, unforgiving walls, and occasional annoyances like lava moats or sheer drops into thin air. If a picture is worth a thousand words, PDAmill’s demo video should count for at least a few grand: http://www.pdamill.com/movies/gears.html 

One interesting feature of Wild Gears is that every race has the exact same competitors. No matter which racecar is being driven by a person, the other three show up at the start line. That means that picking the fastest car automatically ensures that everyone else on the track is slower. The strategy isn’t just picking your car, it’s picking your opponents. I mentioned earlier that I wish there were more cars, and I also wish that the lineup wasn’t limited to one of each model. Winning with the Tank, I mean the Scarab, takes blocking and running over the other three smaller, more fragile cars. What if two Scarabs had to bash it out? The races would be more engaging if the opponents were a surprise.

Although the fifteen tracks have wildly different scenery, most of them drive similarly: the trick is to slam into as few side walls as possible. The best races are the ones with special obstacles like jumps, drops, or ruined columns in the middle of the road. Other courses spice matters up with splits in the route. It’s tough to mix things up much in an unmoving two-dimensional course, but even more implementation of creative ways to vex drivers would have bumped up the excitement.

Maybe the developers figured that surviving the tracks was tough enough already. To even the odds, Wild Gears has several types of power-ups like the Health wrench in the picture, which fixes all the car’s damage. Sharp reflexes can also nab Traction, Shield, or Top Speed.

Records Are Made To Be Broken

Unlock all the tracks. Check. Unlock all the Cups. Check. Win every race in every Cup. Check. What next? I had hoped for some sort of huge, preferably gaudy trophy for winning the Elemental Cup. The ending was more like Myst: you get to go back through everywhere you’ve already won!

Well, there’s always doing it again, faster. Best Times are logged off the Main Menu. Unfortunately there’s no note of which car set the mark. It’s nice to have the records there, but without a strong personal motivation (or even an Internet top drivers list) to drop those numbers even lower, Best Times doesn’t add much to replay value.

Conclusion: It’s All About The Aerodynamics

Once again, PDAmill has put out a game with delightful candy-colored graphics, exuberant detail, catchy music, and addictive gameplay. Wild Gears is a fun ride that’s over too soon. It easily meets the goal of being pick-up-and-playable, but in the process all the streamlining turned a game that ought to invite players to enjoy every moment in its endearingly loopy world into a list to zip through. Ironically, one important area — resource consumption — could have stood a little more time in the wind tunnel.

Where to get: PDAmill, $14.95, for Windows Mobile touchscreen