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Wild Gears is based on the overhead racing concept as seen in games such as Death Rally and others. The concept of the overhead racing game dates back to the 80s or so and is quite a bit different than typical racing games using a first-person perspective. In a way, they're easier because you can see more of the track at once (and especially who's ahead and who's behind you), but they're also a bit more difficult since going around curves requires you'll often have to reverse the controls depending on which direction you're facing. While this type of racing game doesn't have much realism, they can be a lot of fun, especially if developers play up the arcade aspects with additions such as power-ups, weapons, and so forth.

Wild Gears is the second racing game release from PDAMill, the first being the futuristic Wipeout-inspired Flux Challenge. The idea behind WG are those radio-controlled cars most of us played with as kids. Especially if you are male, those little cars were a lot of fun. This game, however, doesn't quite capture the fun and feels a bit too much like a toy.

Let's start with what the game does right. The graphics are typical PDAMill style, detailed, and easy to look at it. The sound effects are also pretty decent, as usual. The game also offers the same well-rounded feature set found in most PDAMill games. In this case, the game offers four different championships, four very different cars, and 15 interesting tracks.

The game looks like a winner, at least on paper. However, it stumbles on execution. After all these years, Pocket PC games still struggle (and sometimes even fall flat) in the interface between gamer and game. Surprisingly, WG offers only one method of input: a circular symbol at the bottom of the screen that you tap and slide to accelerate, brake, and corner. This doesn't seem to work all that well and feels a bit too loose. It's all too easy to find yourself going too fast and crashing into walls. Another problem is that the frame rate, at least on my Dell Axim X51v, is a bit jerky, making it that much harder to see what's happening on the screen. When playing this type of game, I prefer the tactile feedback of buttons and a directional pad. The control circle in WG is, I think, a bit too small to provide any degree of precision when cornering. I'm sure some people will have better results than I did with the game, but I think many people will find that Wild Gears is a little hard to get into because of the controls. Good effort, but the game needs more work before it'll be up to the level of PDAMill's other titles.

Title: Wild Gears	Developer: PDAMill
Genre: Racing	Demo: Y
Platform: Windows Mobile 2003+	Price: $12.95
Discuss this game	Rating (of 4): 2.9