#Drive

While the colorful graphics and narrator cracking jokes suggest it'll be a potentially festive experience, technical issues and an abundance of ads make this hard to fully enjoy. Kids cruise down a road in #Drive, as in many endless driver games, trying to avoid cars in their way. Even if the road doesn't seem to be twisting and turning, kids will need to adjust their car to keep it from rolling off the roadway. It isn't hard to crash into buildings, rocks, and other items that are in the way. You seem to be able to hit one or two things, picking up bottle caps that emerge -- but any other contact, or taking an accidental detour to the side of the road, will end the game.

Kids may have some luck in the game's Zen mode, an easier difficulty level which features light traffic and no police. The game controls, though, are an issue. Holding both sides of the screen triggers the car's brakes, although that doesn't always work, and tapping left or ride to move the car in those directions can be a clumsy process. It takes an extremely gentle touch to accurately move the car -- and even careful attempts on a decently sized device screen can send the car careening off the road, into objects, or both. As a result, your games can be very brief -- which is problematic because it's frustrating, and also because that often triggers a lengthy ad, which kids will have to sit through before they can return to playing. The ads start showing up early in the game, and they're frequent, which makes it hard to keep any kind of momentum. You can work to upgrade your car as you play, but if the controls are that sensitive for the basic model, getting a speedier model might make navigating around things even more difficult. Unless kids find they have a significant ability to maneuver the car using the controls -- or are fine with repeated ad-related downtime -- they may want to put #Drive in park.