Traffic Rider

The camera sits on the handlebars, and that changes everything. Traffic Rider is endless highway racing from a motorbike's first-person view: no finish line, just traffic to thread, speed to hold, and the steady temptation to pass one car closer than the last. It comes from skgames, the studio behind Traffic Racer, and keeps that game's simplicity while wrapping it in a proper career.

Scoring is a dare system. Speed pays, but the bonuses live at the margins: overtake above 100 km/h with inches to spare and the game pays extra; hold a wheelie and it pays again; ride into oncoming traffic on two-way roads and it pays most of all. Every run is a negotiation between greed and the back of a truck.

Around the endless mode sits a career of more than 90 missions that steadily unlock the garage: 34 bikes, bought and upgraded with what you earn, each with engine audio recorded from the real machine. Environments run day and night, leaderboards and 30-plus achievements track the grind, and the interface speaks 19 languages.

Its best policy is what's missing: no timers, no fuel meter, no forced stops — you ride until you crash, full stop. For anyone who finds zen at 160 km/h with a lorry on each side, Traffic Rider is one of the purest arcade loops on Android, which half a billion downloads tend to confirm.