There's a formula to making racing platformers that is designed to be extremely challenging to players. The tracks have to be imaginative. The physics have to be spot-on. The controls need to be precise. There needs to be an impetus to push you forward just as you've conquered your toughest challenge yet. Jet Car Stunts only manages to attain one of those aspects but adds nothing else to the formula.

You control a car that looks like a futuristic F1 racer. It may not have wings, but it does have a rocket propulsion system and some air brakes to slow you down on both land and air. On a variety of impossibly designed tracks suspended high in the air — most of them above cloud level — you have to make it to end, hopefully in one piece.

Beyond the optional tutorial, Jet Car Stunts is split into three modes. Platforming is the main mode, with a total of 25 tracks spread across five difficulty levels. All of these tracks let you play against a ghost opponent to replace the lack of opponents on the track due to the lack of online play. Turbo boosting is limited, but there are checkpoints that let you continue where you left off from a crash and refill your turbo meter. Tracks are designed as one-way affairs, and your medal ranking is based on a combination of time elapsed and number of respawns in one run.

Inherently, the mode seems like it could be fun. The jet car sounds like it can go pretty fast, and the idea of making your own shortcuts via flight is appealing. The track designs can also be wilder, since you have these abilities at your disposal. With audiences now starting to appreciate games that emphasize real challenges, this has the makings of a solid title like Trials, though with a different perspective and vehicle.

Unfortunately, the problems start springing up when you race on your first track. For one thing, the controls are very touchy. It seems fine on the ground, but once you go airborne, even the slightest bump on your analog stick can send your car careening wildly off course. At this point, you might as well hit the respawn button or restart the track since you'll always bump into something that causes your vehicle to explode or get bumped to the side. None of these things are consistent, since the game has no set rules for what should happen when certain actions are performed. Getting bumped or going off course also results in a camera that goes haywire when you're not on the ground. You'll constantly spin in all directions, so you never have the proper time to recover. Track design is good, but it's not good enough to encourage shortcut exploration, so unless you stay on the recommended course, you'll hit restart all the time.

The game never indicates that while you can respawn at any time, the respawns are limited to 10 per stage before you're forced to start over. The game does feature a practice mode for these stages, but practice gives you unlimited turbo and no meter to monitor it, so it's rather useless since you can't properly plan for the real thing by conserving the boost until you need it. Levels can be passed with enough time to learn all of the inconsistent nuances of a floaty and flighty car, but those who aren't used to playing overly demanding titles will abandon the game long before that.

Jet Car Stunts is a cross-buy title, so buying the PS3 version nets you the Vita version as well. This is usually a good thing, but the portable port has a number of gameplay issues in this mode alone that make it vastly inferior to the home console version. The looser analog stick control for the Vita means the car is more squirrely, leading to more control loss at inopportune moments. Leaderboard uploading is also more annoying because anything but a strong connection renders uploads useless, adding more wait time between the end of the level and the appearance of the exit button.

What's really baffling, however, is that all of the levels in this mode are unlocked from the outset. Unlike the PS3 version, you can go straight to the toughest level from the very beginning. This may be good for those who want the most challenging stages right away, but it also kills off any sense of progression and goals. With that challenge out of the way, there's less of a reason to push through the hard levels.

The second mode is Time Trials, and the track design is more akin to what you would expect from a traditional race. You'll take the jet car through 11 different tracks as you try to claim the best possible time in five laps against a ghost car opponent. Unlike Platforming mode, your medal ranking is completely based on time, and a countdown timer shows you how much time elapses before you're knocked down to a lower level. Also, you can respawn as many times as you want, and your checkpoint respawn places time back on your clock instead of penalizing you.

The Time Trials mode inherits a few problems that are present in Platforming mode, particularly with the physics and controls. The track design helps make up for this, so you won't encounter the wayward issues that often, but they still exist. The Vita version also gives you less of a reason to care about getting gold medals, since all of the tracks are immediately open. The low number of tracks is disappointing because to some degree, these are less frustrating than the Platforming tracks and give the player more of a reason to return since the frustration level is very low.

The final mode is Collection, and it seems like it's tacked on without much thought behind it. Here, the user is tasked with grabbing five stars in a collection of eight tracks that are otherwise unmodified from the Platforming mode. Instead of the stars being on the track, they're usually located on top of other blocks in the environment, encouraging you to try to find ways up those blocks through a combination of flight and consistent boosting. Aside from the issues with control and physics, the mode simply doesn't work well on these tracks. Since the tracks were designed to be traversable in only one direction, missing a star means resetting the whole thing since you can't backtrack. Checkpoints also sabotage you, since passing one resets you to a spot at which you may not want to spawn. The lack of unlimited boosting also means it gets even more difficult to reach a spot you were probably never meant to hit in the first place. Even if you pull off a miracle and get all five stars, it means nothing since there's no leaderboard and all of the tracks are unlocked for this mode anyway. It exists as a bullet point — and a relatively broken one at that.

Graphically, Jet Car Stunts is serviceable. The environments have some really nice skyboxes, and there's some decent lighting and shadows on the tracks. The car is pretty well detailed, especially the airbrakes, which have visible moving pistons. The tracks and the rest of the environmental objects are simple shapes with little to no rounding. Those who have played some of the older arcade games like Hard Drivin' and Race Drivin' will no doubt recognize the style as simple textures and colors. Even with this stylistic choice, the game has a hard time producing a solid high frame rate when particles are present, though it's less evident on the Vita.

Unlike the graphics, the audio barely exists. The sound effects exist for things like your car's motor and crashing obstacles, and they're good since there's not much that can be done to improve things like that. Music is limited to the main menu, and while it would be nice to have something else to listen to on the track aside from the droning of the engine, the generic nature of the main menu music makes it forgettable anyway. PS3 owners get to hear this tune because curiously, it's missing on the Vita iteration.

Jet Car Stunts had the potential to be something good, but there are too many issues to give it any sort of recommendation. The physics system lacks polish to the point that you can go off track, spin out of control or get disoriented through no fault of your own, and the problem is compounded by a terrible camera. The control scheme may be fine, if unrefined, on the PS3, but it's much worse on the Vita, and the lackluster presentation suffers from the same issues. With a small amount of available modes and levels and a lack of purpose for the Vita version in particular, Jet Car Stunts is simply overshadowed by more accomplished platform racers.

Score: 4.0/10