Limelight

The city is every shade of grey there is — white streets, pale pavements, blocks of flats in three tones of concrete, long soft shadows across all of it. The only thing in it with any colour is a lime-green hatchback doing seventy through a junction, and every police car in town has seen it.

Limelight is an isometric getaway played with two buttons and no brake pedal worth mentioning. Steer left, steer right, keep moving. The police take the shortest way round the block, cut the corners you take wide and line up to ram you the moment you slow down, so the trick is to take a corner so late that they cannot — every patrol car you put into a wall, a lamp post or another patrol car pays out in metres and coins, and a chain of them pays out more. Lamp posts topple, hydrants flood the street, your tyre marks stay where you left them, and a car that has been hit enough times smokes, then burns, then goes up.

Wanted stars climb with time and with chaos. One star is a patrol car that cannot quite keep up; three bring SWAT vans and spike strips across the road; four bring a helicopter, and the evening comes down with it; five bring the army. Coins buy a garage of eight cars that drive and break differently — a microcar that turns on a coin, a muscle car with too much engine, an ice-cream van that plays a tune — and the record you are chasing has a name: tearaway, wheelman, public enemy, city legend. Three standing jobs — trick two cops into a wall, hold a four-second drift, hit a ×3 chain — pay out at the end of every run and come back harder.