Top Gear’s Road Trip is a fiendishly clever new racing game

Here’s a racing game with a twist: no longer can you rely on the crash barriers or rival racers to safely guide you around the next corner. Nope, Top Gear’s new Road Trip app – available to download now, for free – uses a fiendishly addictive new mechanism.

The premise is simple: you simply choose your road trip, and then drag-race using an innovative Action Match-3 gameplay.

You simply match the different colours at the bottom of the screen to accelerate and shift up through the gears in the main-play drag race mode, avoiding rivals and obstacles that get in your way to victory.

The Burnout mode brings with it some actual turning. Want to turn left? Again, just match up all the left icons on the bottom half of the screen, and bingo. Brakes? Same story. But nobody really needs brakes in a racing game. That’s what opponents are for.

There’s more, too. You can collect points and upgrade your cars through the game, as well as equip them with choice weaponry to attack your rivals. Stick potatoes in your rivals’ exhaust pipes, make their seat heaters malfunction, even drop pianos on their roofs. Hey, at least this time your fellow racing drivers will have a decent excuse for losing.

It’s not just racing either – the in-app challenges are inspired by the TV show, so you can pilot the Reliant Robin rocket, or take charge of the amphibious car.

Download now using this link here.