Though a direct comparison of the two would be unfair, in many ways Line Rider 2 faced the same dilemma as 2D Boy’s World Of Goo: how do you take a hit freeware downloadable and expand it to a full retail release? InXile’s answer, to add pre-set story mode challenges, might seem an obvious one, but in practice brings the game to the kind of crashing halt seen in so many of its hastily drawn loops. To ease the player into learning both its creation tools and the larger laws of its universe, InXile has created increasingly complex levels but deleted large swaths of track, leaving players to fill in the gaps.

At the same time, though, the tools in its free-draw mode that make even the simplest YouTube-dazzling tricks possible – primarily a flag that allows quick bookmarks for specific bits to be fine tuned – have also been stripped, making the entirety of the story mode a lurching, halting back-and-forth of draw and redraw, each time blindly hoping that shifting a few tedious pixels will have the intended consequence.

But the true appeal of Line Rider lies in the creativity of the users, and InXile should be lauded for one of the most robust online community setups to grace Nintendo’s handheld, enabling users to link the DS game to a web profile, where they can browse and queue tracks for later download.

And yet, for the format that should have been the most natural way to bring a track to life, even the currently uploaded creations amount to little more than chicken scratches that, while resulting in a technically impressive set of sled-grinds, come nowhere near the impossibly complex beauty of the PC oeuvre.

This may well change as users learn to exploit the limitations of the platform, but Unbound ultimately remains an unwelcoming title for the novices it hoped its grand makeover would reach.

5/10