If you happened to play Midway's L.A. Rush upon its console release late last year, you are hereby excused from reading this review. Just know that Rush for the PSP is the exact same game, tweaked ever so slightly to make it more handheld-friendly and to include a lousy new stunt mode. For those who missed out on L.A. Rush, it's worth mentioning that it had just about zilch to do with Midway's classic arcade racers that bore the Rush name. L.A. Rush was, for all intents and purposes, a cheap capitalization on the wave of street-racing games that repeatedly crashed against consoles in the last year or two. Although it had a bit of attitude, decent driving controls, and some nice licensed vehicles, the combination of no online play, a barely-there car-customization element, and a grind of a story mode dragged the game down quite a bit. Rush for the PSP does very little to counteract these issues. The few things that have been adjusted don't make the game better, but rather, duller.

If you were actually clamoring to play L.A. Rush on your PSP, we will hold this lackluster port against you.

The bulk of your time with Rush will be spent in the story mode. Here, you play as Trikz, a renowned racer in the LA underground scene who has the mansion and car collection to back up his sizable reputation. Trikz's seemingly lavish lifestyle is put to the test, however, when a local race promoter by the name of Lidell (played with flamboyant silliness by Def Jam's How to Be a Player star Bill Bellamy) is set to put on a major series of races. Lidell is not particularly fond of Trikz and tries to tip the scales against him by using his connections to rob Trikz of all his rides, which sets in motion a long-winded game of "find the missing cars," with quite a bit of racing in between.

The setup for this story mode is entirely decent. You'd think that going on this lengthy quest to reacquire all your stolen rides and stick it to the man who robbed you would at least elicit some measure of satisfaction. You'd be wrong, in this case. The story itself is lent very little screen time. You get bits of phone conversations from time to time from your sidekick Ty, as well as Lidell's lady, who is sucked in by your irresistible charms, and you'll get the occasional cutscene right as you enter a new territory and series of races, but apart from this, you don't get much out of it. Things play out very predictably and unimaginatively. But hey, that's fine. Most street racers aren't known for their heart-wrenching narratives. All that matters is that the driving is good, right? Well...

The good news is that Rush's driving model, by itself, is enjoyable. The game's sense of speed is right up there with the most recent entry in the Midnight Club franchise, and when you get going, you really feel the traffic whiz by you. It even uses that nice, subtle motion blur around the edges of the screen to great effect. The handling is a bit loose, but rarely so much that you can't control your car. It's effective for pulling off big drifts around corners and dodging in and out of traffic where needed, all while maintaining high speeds on busy city streets; and boy are they ever busy. The developers have managed to get an awful lot of traffic onto the streets of LA, and it's a constant nuisance. You'll have to be mindful when running red lights, as there's almost always cross traffic to avoid. If you don't, you're punished (or perhaps rewarded, if ever so slightly) with a spectacular wreck, complete with an extra-stylish camera angle and copious amounts of particle effects.

The racing remains lame in Rush, but for completely different reasons. It's now overly easy, rather than overly difficult.

Interestingly enough, in this version of Rush, crashes don't have nearly as much of an effect on a race as they did in the game's console predecessors. You can run smack-dab into a semitruck at high speeds, get stopped for a bit, and be passed by your opponent racers. But unlike in the console games, it's incredibly easy to catch up and overtake them again. The rubber-band artificial intelligence that made races so frustrating on consoles has basically been reversed here. It's like the racers are just waiting for you to catch up and overtake them, no matter how far behind you get. Some of the later sections of the game are a bit more challenging, but for the most part, it's a breeze to blow through the races.

This reversal of difficulty permeates just about every aspect of the game. Like the racer AI, the cop AI has been toned down a lot. There are still ridiculous numbers of cop cars floating around the city of LA, but even when your requisite "wanted meter" raises and the cops start chasing you, they barely do anything to stop you. Even if they do find a way to stop you, all you get is a paltry fine, and you lose next to no time at all within a race. If you're pulled over in first place, odds are that you'll resume the race in first place as well. One of the biggest problems with L.A. Rush was that its method of earning cash was basically broken. You earn money in the game by winning races, but all races come with an entry fee. The problem with the original was that it was too easy to lose races cheaply and bankrupt yourself, but with that issue now out of the way, you never want for cash.