Little Racers, an Xbox Live Indie Game from Milkstone Studios, harkens back to the old days of gaming when there was a such thing as video arcades. Back during the '80s Atari had a couple of games called Super Sprint and Championship Sprint. Both of these games featured steering wheels for controllers which guided a car across a top-down 2D track. Back in the day, this was considered quite innovative and it was hard as hell to play. Eventually these games made it to home consoles via compilation packages from Midway, but playing these games on a control pad were terrible. Fast forward to today with the release of Little Racers and nothing has changed one bit.

Just like the old-school games of the past, Little Racers has you racing on 20 top-down courses that range from easy loop courses to tough road courses with plenty of intersections. Of course it's the intersections that make the game both fun and frustrating at the same time since you can crash into the other cars. Although Little Racers is not a destruction derby event, you can sure make it like one. Speaking of the cars, there's a grand total of 40 cars to choose from that are divided into different classes. Class S reresents the best of the pack with Class G being the worst. Each car accelerates and handles differently although you won't notice the difference much when your racing.

There are four different ways to play Little Racers, but they all have the same concept. There's the Quick Race Mode where your randomly thrown into a random car ad track to race on. You can also customize your own race by setting the track, laps, how many cars on the track racing, and the difficulty. The Championship Mode will be the area that you'll spend the most of your time in. In this mode you'll compete in a series of races with AI competitors which range from the ones that need driving school (easy) to the Fast and the Furious (hard). At the end of each race you'll be awarded points based upon how you finish. Obviously, the person with the most points at the end of the series wins. Now we all know that racing by yourself can become boring after awhile. Little Racers has a full multiplayer mode which allows you and up to 11 other people to race locally (via System Link) or on Xbox Live.

Graphically, Little Racers is not much to look at. Then again neither was Super Sprint and Championship Sprint. The colors are kind of bland although the track does stand out over the backgrounds. One of the graphical features that I like is the realistic skid marks you leave when hitting those brakes on turns. These skid marks stay on the track throughout the race unlike some racing games which has them disappear. As for the audio, Little Racers does have some good background music with some jazz tunes in the menus and a rock soundtrack during the races to kickstart that need for speed. As for the sound effects, the car and crash sounds are rather generic while the skidding noises can get rather annoying after awhile.

Overall, Little Racers is not a bad game, but it's not a great game either. This is one of those games that I would recommned playing in short periods, because longer sessions will lead to some quick boredom. Those of you that are fans of Super Sprint and Championship Sprint should definitely purchase the game. As for the rest of you, I would suggest giving the demo a test drive first.