This review is for the Nintendo DS game, Dragon Booster, developed and published by Konami Computer Entertainment. Dragon Booster is a racing game, based on the children's television series of the same name.

The aim of the game is that you have to race a dragon and passenger to be the first of six to cross the finishing line. You have to overtake the other five participants in the race as you start each level at the back and have to play catch up. However this overtaking is a little random, as the race isn't linear, and you catch up with the other dragons at a fixed time, regardless of how well you're doing.

When you do catch up with an opponent, you can't really beat them by better racing tactics. Instead you have to attack them with various weapons or by trying to make them fall by blocking the track in front of you. The problem with all of this is that it is less of a racing game and more of an action game, but the blending of the two really doesn't work very well. The game would be much better if it were just a racing game.

Controlling the game can be a bit fiddly, and you can use both the stylus and touch screen, as well as the d-pad. Trying to control the dragon's moves using the stylus can be quite unresponsive and really frustrating after a while. After a few missed moves, playing the game becomes ever more frustrating. There is the other problem that there sometimes feel as though there are simply too many controls, which makes matters even more confusing.

The graphics in the game are quite limited, and it's not the case that the tracks are interesting and different to play, as they always feel the same, which makes it quite boring to play the game. The sound is better, with interesting background music and sound effects, which do add a little to the atmosphere of the game.

You can play this game in multi player mode, but it really doesn't play very well. It's quite sluggish, and can be quite hard to really get going in the race. It is always useful to have a multi player function, as just playing against a friend can be fun and give the game extra shelf life, but in this case, it doesn't really add much to the game.

If you win a race then you are given prize money, and you can use this to purchase different elements for your dragon, to make it go faster. It can take some time and a lot of racing to acquire a lot of these extras, although this is at least an incentive to keep on playing.

The game retails for 29.99 pounds but currently sells on Amazon for 6.50 pounds. if you're happy with a second hand copy, at time of writing, these are available for around just three or four pounds on sites such as eBay and Amazon. The game is rated as 3+, so is suitable for children of nearly all ages.

In summary, this isn't really a very good game, although the principle is good, the execution is poor. This is a shame given that the game does use many of the Nintendo DS's features, but ultimately the controls are hard to use, the graphics are limited and the actual game play really isn't very exciting. Unfortunately there isn't much that will bring you back to this game, and there isn't much positive to say. Likely to be a disappointment, even to racing fans or fans of the original television series on which this is based.