Essentially, MiniOne Racing puts you in charge of a toy car with which you try to win first place against up to three other cars. I make the qualifier "toy car", because there are really only five controls: turn left, turn right, accelerate forward, accelerate in reverse, and fire/use special. There's no switching to lower gears, no brakes, no powersliding, nothing that you'd expect to find in a modern racer.

You start the game looking at your car from above and behind, which is the default camera mode. The Tab key lets you switch between this and two other views: directly overhead, and "first person". Your mileage may vary, of course, but I find that the direct overhead view lets you see as much of the track and your opponents as possible, which is a good thing.

After the five-count, it's go time, which means holding down the accelerate forward key and using the left and right keys to navigate the track. Now, there's an immediate problem, which is this: it seems that your opponents are all either 1) faster than you are, and/or 2) more maneuverable than you are. Even after multiple go-'rounds on the same track, learning the layout and figuring out how to use the power-ups, I was never able to win a match. The straightaways aren't quite long enough to test this hypothesis, but it does seem as though your opponents have a higher top speed than you do.

Part of this might be that you get to choose the engine type of your opponents: 50, 100, 150, or 200cc, but you don't know what your own engine type is. It's possible that I just chose a type that's more powerful than my own, but there should be some way to manage that; it seems like a given.

The demo only has two tracks available, one with a beach theme, and another in space. Both tracks are easy to run through, as the game isn't really about speed per se -- as long as you're the first-place finisher, that's all that matters. Even with the inclusion of environmental hazards like pylons to run into and small creatures that crop up unexpectedly, these things just slow you down for a few seconds. There is slightly more to play than this, of course, so keep reading.