One of our favourite parts of the game was the weapons, and there's a handful of ways that you can wreck an opponent's good progress. You'll want to boost a lot, which means you'll also be pulling tricks all the time, which can lead to some strange looking races with some cars facing the wrong way, some on two wheels, while others shunt each other out of the way. By racing on two wheels, driving backwards, drifting around corners, or hitting barrels on the track, you charge your turbo which can be then spent on pushing you to the front of the pack. Drifting felt a little too angular, and the competing racers feel overly clustered at times, but other than that the racing was very accessible, making it ideal for younger players. It doesn't matter how many events you've got to choose from if the racing isn't up to scratch, but Cars 3 offers a perfectly acceptable behind-the-wheel experience. Throw in master events, an open-world area filled with events and ramps for pulling tricks, and four-car multiplayer of the local variety, and you've got a well-stocked selection of things to be getting on with. There's a fairly standard race mode, plus stunt-filled events, battle races and a takedown mode full of bots, and you can always try and set a fastest lap if you prefer to lose the distraction of racing against AI-controlled opponents. Races take place over a selection of main game types.

The cars themselves are all pretty similar in terms of handling, but you can customise them a little via different sounding horns, coloured flames when hitting turbo, and so on. The tracks and all the cars are either pulled directly from or are heavily inspired by the new movie, and there's plenty of vehicles and tracks to unlock across a range of events. The film, which we've also had the pleasure of watching, syncs up nicely with what is actually a surprisingly varied game that comes with plenty to unlock, and lots of nods to the Cars series. It won't win a single prize for innovation or originality, but if you're after an easy and largely accessible arcade racer, you could actually do a lot worse than to check out Avalanche Software's new Pixar-themed tie-in. At least, that's the impression we got from playing Cars 3: Driven to Win, a game that's surprisingly solid all things considered. The tipping point came when companies realised that they could make as much from the games as they could from the films, and that's when they started to take them more seriously. The days of getting routinely awful movie tie-in video games are starting to ease off, it would seem.

Metacritic cars 3 driven to win