There was really only one thing wrong with last years FlatOut: Ultimate Carnage on the 360 and that was that you'd have had to lug around a and a console if you'd have wanted to play it on the move. Okay, so that's not quite true (about there only being one thing wrong with it, not about the need to lug heavy equipment around) there were a few weird physics quirks and the AI was a little on the unforgiving and elastic side for some people. But, the fact remains that it was a damn fine game and anyone with even a passing interest in the genre should have bought and loved it with all their gaming heart. So, now it's arrived, fully portable, on the in slightly remixed FlatOut Head On flavour there is even less reason not to own a copy. Isn't life grand.

Fans of Ultimate Carnage will feel right at home as soon as they boot up Head On as the game makes little attempt to hide its parentage with a virtually identical structure to proceedings even down to the same soundtrack. Central to the game are the two main game modes, Carnage and FlatOut, the former offers a series of points based races and challenges to progress through and unlock while the latter is your more traditional tournament racing with prize money that can be spent on new cars and upgrades.

It's out on the track where FlatOut games make their mark though and Head On is no exception. Despite the relatively miniscule power of the PSP next to the 360 the people at Interactive have done a superb job of cramming all the series trademark destructibility and crashes into the palm of your hand. Some of the tracks have a slightly disarmingly familiar yet different feel to them that hints at certain tweaks and changes made to keep things from juddering to a halt but since new tracks are a good thing we're not complaining.

The spirit of the game has also remained fully intact with the big muscley cars feeling far more Dukes of Hazard than Gran Turismo. The slightly strange physics quirks that often appeared in Ultimate Carnage have largely (but not totally) been eradicated here but the sometimes unfair AI remains intact. On the PSP this rubber band approach to AI is actually more of a problem than it was on the 360 for the simple reason that you'll find you make more mistakes per lap than you used to. This is down to the twitchy nature of the PSP's analogue control which yet again takes a little bit of gloss off the experience by simply not being anywhere near as usable as the ones found on a conventional game pad (if I had a pound for every time I've said that in a review...). It's not game-breaking by any means and if you've played a PSP before you'll know what to expect, but it does make it a tad frustrating when you loose three or four places because of it.

Graphically the PSP isn't going to compete with the 360 for obvious reasons but it does a fantastic job of getting as close as it can. Considering the amount of debris flying around and the detailed damage models of the cars it's quite an achievement to have it all whizzing along at speed with no real glitches or slowdown.

Pleasingly the move to the PSP hasn't seen the banishment of the other big draw of the FlatOut series, the stunt mode. This is where the game's perverse sense of fun comes to the fore as you speed down ramps to build up speed before shooting your rag doll driver through the windscreen using him as the projectile in anything from a game of darts to ten pin bowling. Much like the athletics games of old the key to success is to build up as much speed as possible before holding down the 'fire' button long enough to hit to optimum eject angle. It's all very silly and very tongue in cheek but it's also immense fun and one of the best bonus features in a game ever.

Thankfully, the high score setting nature of these mini games and the obvious portability of the PSP haven't been ignored when it comes to as there's an eight player pass-the-PSP stunt challenge mode for those with friends. If your friends also have PSP's and a copy of the game you can go one step further and indulge in four player racing via an Ad-Hoc connection (no true multiplayer, boo hiss) which is nice to have although I still remain intrigued as to how often these Ad-Hoc modes actually get used.

As a fully signed up member of the FlatOut fan club all Head On really needed to do to win me over was not screw things up horribly and it's fair to say its achieved that simple aim with ease. It's easily one of the better PSP racers out there, the potent mix of high-speed racing and spectacular crashes setting it apart from the more clean cut thrills found in WipeOut and Ridge Racer. If for some reason you've not been charmed by the series in the past then that's unlikely to change here but for the rest of us this is exactly what we wanted, handheld FlatOut.

85%

By Paul Newcombe

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