Every once in a while a person has a revelation, if they are a developer this usually results in them producing a stunning game where a household man might invent a wind-up radio, or a television producer might decide that sticking a small group of morons into a house full of cameras makes good television. Luckily, the creator of Bike or Die is a developer, otherwise we might well have a new sport on our hands for biking fanatics which would turn our streets into a holocaustic nightmare of twisted BMX frames and mangled corpses.

Simply put, Bike or Die is the most suitably named game I have ever played, you either bike (and do it well) or meet with an untimely, often comical and quite distressing end. The game concept is as simple as the name and, as I am sure everyone knows, the most simple game concepts have a nasty little habit of resulting in the most fun and playable games, undermining the years and years of work major games developers waste on their over-hyped FPS games.

Bike or Die takes a classically simple side-scrolling approach to suicidal cycle simulation using landscape reminiscent of Soldat, in other words you have "air" which does not kill you "scenery" which looks pretty and "landscape" which you cycle on and which, if you do not cycle carefully, will cause you to bail off your bike in a whole plethora of spectacular and impressive ways. Valve spent years making barrels roll, cookers fall, and cement blocks lift you up when placed on the opposite end of a seesaw – I would hazard a guess it took a matter of months to give one stick man on a mountain bike the opportunity to die in so many ways and, you know? The stickman and the bike are infinitely more entertaining.

Of course, dying is certainly not the object of Bike or Die. You must, instead, use all of your skill, determination and lot of trial and error to make it through each level and cycle over flags. Sounds easy? The flags are dotted around the levels, between you and them are all manner of obstacles from simple jumps to steep slopes and deadly traps, all of which you must pass without being thrown over your handle bars or somehow managing to pull just over half of a summersault and land on your head. It is almost as if the terrain is out to get you, passing each obstacle takes all the skills and tricks you can muster so a significant amount of satisfaction can be gained by successfully defying the laws of Bike or Die's physics and grabbing those flags without meeting an untimely end.

The control in Bike or Die could not be simpler, although the game is available for all Palm OS users I found the consoles automatically set to perfectly suit the Zodiac. The left shoulder button acts as your breaks hit them too hard and you fly over the handlebars, just like on a real bicycle. The right shoulder button acts as your accelerator, go too fast over some obstacles and all manner of horrible things can happen – any BMX enthusiast will testify to that. The blue hardware button turns your bike around so you can head off to collect flags in the opposite direction. The yellow and red hardware buttons allow you to balance your bicycle, pull wheelies, and often save the little stick mans face from a first hand meeting with the terrain - if your reactions are quick enough, anyway. Finally the green button gives you access to a map so you can hunt down those flags and find out just what is in store for you.

If the buzzword means anything to you, Bike or Die is definitely "free roaming", you are simply challenged to get hold of all the flags in the map in any way you can. However, a careful look at the terrain will usually give you an idea of what you must do to get each of these flags. The choice of which order to get the flags in is entirely up to you, just keep biking and avoid dying until you have passed all the red flags and finally made it to the chequered finish flag.

There is a greater challenge in Bike or Die than simply completing each level, your scores can be submitted to an online, interactive hall of fame so completing each level as quickly as possible will see your name rise higher up the ranks until you are racing the champion for a pole position. In this way, and with no Internet connectivity in itself, Bike or Die manages to obtain a huge multiplayer aspect pitting players from around the globe against each other and adding a huge amount of replay value to the game. If you are the competitive type then Bike or Die will have you hooked for a long, long time.

Not only does the pseudo multiplayer and competitive spirit of Bike or Die add replay value, but there is also a level editor available letting budding mappers from throughout the community create their own masterpieces of mayhem to challenge your cycling skills and give you a chance to one-up your opponents by being the first to get the knack to the new levels. You can easily try your own hand at making levels and submitting them to the community to make your own contribution.

Philip Howard