The Burnout series has been a personal favorite of mine, even when Acclaim held the rights. You can imagine how excited I was when the announcement came that Burnout would be coming to the PSP.

The good news is that this game does not disappoint. The bad news is that this game has absolutely nothing to do with the also recently released Burnout Revenge games for the PlayStation 2 and Xbox. While the game is a stand alone good game, if you’ve been playing the new Xbox title for some time and then go to this game, you have to re-learn the old rules of play. You’ll probably learn the hard way that you cannot hit any traffic at any time in races), but once you remember you will be ready to play. Of course, if you have only played the Burnout series up until Burnout 3, you’ll be in fine shape.

When you fire up the game on your PSP you will be treated to an audio extravaganza courtesy of EA Trax. Looking and listening at the initial screens, you’ll find it hard to believe you are playing a handheld system!

For those new to the Burnout series, let’s go over the basics: this is a racing game but with some new rules. In order to get “turbo” you’ll have to drive in the oncoming traffic lanes, create plenty of near-miss accidents, get air on jumps and take out your opponents by crashing them into walls, guardrails and oncoming traffic. With each opponent takedown your turbo boost meter increases quite a bit, so it’s definitely worth your while.

At the main menu, you are presented with a number of options: World Tour (essentially the career mode where you’ll spend most of your time), single event (you can choose race, time attack, road rage, pursuit, and crash mode), multiplayer (sorry adhoc mode only, no online) and driver details (you can view your progress in game).

We’ll spend most of our time covering World Tour because that’s where you’re going to spend the majority of your time. This mode keeps a running tally for you and requires you to place high in order to unlock more events in the game. In the very beginning of the game you’ll start off with a compact car and as you progress you’ll be able to unlock muscle, sport, coupe and ‘super’ cars. The game does a good job in keep you appraised of your progress—how many takedowns or points are required to go to the next level.

Think of the World Tour as a veritable Olympics of driving – there will be straight races (straight but you can still take out your opponents), pursuits (you drive a police car and you have to takedown the bad guy, which is always a lot of fun and makes you wonder why EA took it out of the new game for Xbox, but I digress). There’s also a ‘road rage’ mode where your only goal is to takedown as many of your opponents as you can in a time limit or before your car is toast, whichever comes first.

There are even more modes than this: face-off is a 1-on-1 race where if you win, you get the vehicle of your loser. An eliminator mode is also included where at the end of each lap the last place car is eliminated. Finally a Burning Lap (race against time) and Grand Prix (multiple races, highest point total wins) round out the events. Phew. One thing is for sure: with the variety of modes available you will not be bored.

Those are just the race events. You also need to compete in crash modes. During crash modes, your goal is to crash into as many vehicles as possible. Compared to the ‘revenge’ console games, it’s great to be able to go back for this part. The icons are back and there’s no golf meter to get your car going. This is the crash mode we all know and love.

Load times are noticeable but not exorbitant. EA seems to have a problem with game loads on the PSP. One hopes these load times are fixed in later games.

My personal favorites are the pursuit, road rage and grand prix. The least favorite of mine are the burning lap and time attack modes, mainly because you are only racing against a clock and you can’t stop and appreciate the scenery or take out a vehicle—after all you would be wasting time.

Although it seems as though your primary goal is to win so you’ll unlock more stuff, there are additional rewards for excellent performance. You’ll receive trophies, signature takedown photos and more.

In game graphics are superb for a handheld unit but a small step down from the console versions. You do have a sense of speed in the game, however control using the analog stick could be better – you definitely miss having a steering wheel.

Audio is superb – from the excellent EA Trax to the sounds of metal crashing into medal, you want to make sure you hook up the headphones for this game.

Ad-hoc multiplayer mode is a lot of fun – and this is one of the new games that support the ‘game sharing’ service – which means that even if your buddy doesn’t have a copy of the game, you can still send him one track to play together with. The Game Sharing feature of the PSP is a fantastic invention and should be standard for all games from this point forward.