The case for the five-minute racer

Big racing games want hours of your time: garages, tuning, long career ladders. On a phone, I almost never want that. I want to open an app, race for five minutes, and close it.

Neon Drift Rally gets this completely. One track, one perfect drift line, one ghost of my previous best to chase. There's no menu maze between me and the fun, and that's the whole appeal.

The genre lives and dies on how its controls feel. Floaty steering ruins everything. I spent a day switching between tilt and tap before settling on tap, and once it clicked the game became hard to put down.

If you want depth, this isn't the subgenre for you. But for pure reflex fun in short bursts, a good arcade racer is one of the best things on a phone.