I don't know about you, but I always think of cake when I'm considering a new racing game. You don't? Well, let me explain. To bake a cake you only need a few simple ingredients: flour, sugar, eggs, butter, and maybe some sultanas or cocoa powder. Mix it all up in a bowl and stick it in the oven for half an hour, and before you can say "this analogy doesn't make sense" you have a delicious slice of sponge on your plate. Racing games are the same. To make a decent one, all you need are a few simple ingredients. Take a handful of fast cars, a few well-designed tracks, some grungy music, a dash of engine noise and a pinch of colourful graphics. Get a team of coders to mix it all up and serve it with a plateful of aggressive AI. Before you know it, you have a slice of fun action in your PSP.

Like cakes, though, it really isn't that simple. If you've ever tried to follow a cake recipe and ended up with burned biscuits instead of fluffy buns, you'll know that it really doesn't take much for it all to go hideously wrong. Even if you follow the recipe to the letter, sometimes things just don't work out as planned. The biscuits might actually taste alright but when you're eating them you'll know that, if you'd just taken a little more care, a bit more time over cooking them, they could have been so much better. They could have been cake.

Can you see where I'm going with this yet?

FlatOut: Head On seems to have all the right ingredients. It has a wide selection of cars, arranged across a few classes (non of them licensed, but that doesn't really matter). There are a few different tracks, all of them with such tasty extras as hidden shortcuts, destructible scenery, ramps and tunnels, narrow gaps, chicanes and tight bends. The music is guitary and suitably rhythmic, the sound effects are all heavy metal engines and thrashy crash noises. The graphics are colourful, fast and smooth, with sparks flying and bits of car and scenery spinning off all around you. The AI is nasty, with enemy cars taking violent revenge on you for committing such terrible crimes as overtaking them or just being generally faster than they are.

Along with all the standard ingredients, there are a few sultanas (or do I mean extra features?) The cars can all be upgraded using the money you win in the races, and the upgrades improve their performance in terms of speed, handling and durability. As well as the standard racetracks, there are a selection of Destruction Derby events to play through (anyone old enough to remember Psygnosis's 1995 PSOne game of the same name will look forward to playing these), and a whole slew of mini-game style 'stunts' to perform. These range from bowling to darts, from soccer to basketball, from stone-skipping to the ring of fire. What's more, you can play these mini-games against other people if you like, by setting up a multiplayer match and then competing for high scores by taking turns on the same PSP. There's an adhoc multiplayer mode too, which lets you race against your friends, either around tracks or in a last-car-rolling destruction derby. As well as the FlatOut mode (which is basically a tournament mode that sees you rising up through the classes of car and competing in a variety of events against the computer for money), there's a Carnage mode that allows you to compete on a variety of single events for cash too. Everything is well presented and looks pretty polished, and the whole experience will last a while too, both the first time through and in replayability afterwards.

So far, so good, then. You might think that all this would add up to a pretty sweet cake (or do I mean racing game?) In some ways you'd be right and the initial impressions are good. The trouble is, this isn't really a cake; it's more of a biscuit. You see, the ingredients are all there, but the mix is wrong. Upgrading or replacing your car makes little difference to the experience; they all feel and sound the same as each other, and even if you buy a much faster machine, the AI players do the same, so you never really have any advantage. The racetracks all end up feeling samey and the PSP's little screen isn't really capable of displaying stuff in the distance well enough for you to be able to react in time. You need to learn the tracks by heart in order to compete - true of many racing games of course, but at least normally you can see where you're going. With this game on this screen, you're almost driving blind.

To make it worse, much worse, the AI is far too aggressive. You'll be smashed about, knocked off the track completely, spun around so you're facing the wrong way and (this is the most unforgivable bit of all) you'll lose track of the number of times that you're an inch from the finish line and half a dozen AI cars come from nowhere at impossible speed and zip past you. It reminds me a little of the original Mario Kart - you can never really get away from your opponents and the results of each race are more down to luck than skill because of their horrible aggressiveness. You'll end up playing the same race over and over again just to place somewhere in the top three, and no matter how much you play, your results will always be down to whether another car knocks you out at the last minute (either by overtaking or by smashing into you).

The mini-games sound like fun, but they all really work in the same way; drive a car as fast as you can through a few obstacles, then press the right trigger to launch your driver through the windscreen (the longer you hold the trigger, the higher the angle of launch) and steer his limp body through the air toward some kind of target (a dartboard, or a football goal, or a ring of fire, or whatever). Playing against other people is kind of fun for a while, but it gets tired pretty quickly, and although the adhoc racing is great, a proper online mode would have been better. The music is grungy, edgy, guitary, yes; but after a while it begins to grate and get annoying. The engine noise is fine, but it sounds the same no matter which car you're in. The destruction derby tracks are a great idea, but your car often seems to be made of plastic compared to the platinum of your enemies.

In other words, FlatOut: Head On looks a bit like a nice slice of cake, but in reality it's more of a biscuit. It's not even a particularly pleasant biscuit, either; the first bite or two is nice enough, but after an hour or so you'll begin to taste the bitter unfairness of the AI, or the stale mini-games, or the… well, you get the idea. It's a shame, because the ingredients are great, but this just doesn't work. If you're into racing games then there's a whole slew of them on the PSP and you'll find a much better one than this (Burnout Legends, anyone?) If, on the other hand, you're into cake… what can I say? This is a game, not a cake (whose analogy was that anyway?) It's just not a very good one.

Reviewed by Dom Turner for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).