Dust Route Rally

Dust Route Rally skips the online leaderboards most phone racers lean on and instead gives you a solid career mode you can play anywhere. The cars feel heavy, the back end slides out on gravel, and learning to pitch into a corner early is the whole skill. It's closer to a stage-based rally than a traffic-dodging arcade racer.

You tune the car between stages, and those tweaks matter more than you'd think. Softer suspension helped us on the rough mountain tracks, while the tarmac stages wanted a stiffer setup. There's a tilt option and a touch-button option, and both work well, though we settled on buttons for the precise braking.

Visually it's clean rather than spectacular, and the track selection could be wider. But the driving model is the real star, and that's what matters in a racer. We lost a good evening to shaving seconds off the forest stage.

What we liked

• Satisfying dirt-road handling
• Meaningful car tuning
• Full career mode, all offline