While I’m been away from my PC over the past week, I’ve been indulging my gaming habit with this gem of a game on my PSP. It’s essentially a shrunk down version of Midnight Club: Los Angeles for the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360 but it still packs an astonishing amount of content and will likely delight any racing fan for a good long while. It delivers seriously intense racing experiences, a very satisfying sense of progression over time and despite being somewhat repetitive and frustratingly difficult at times, a tremendous sense of achievement when you’ve finally won some of the harder races.

Midnight Club LA Remix is essentially an open world racer in which you drive around a complete and beautifully detailed city to find races to participate in, earning reputation, unlocking rewards and making money along the way. One of the things I liked best about the game is how much it felt like an RPG. Starting as a virtual unknown in a old and clunky car, you’ll painstakingly progress towards the flashiest and sleekest Mercedes and Lamborghinis. Unlike the Grand Theft Auto series, Remix uses actual cars and motorcycles from real world brands, so there’s that additional sense of realism.

Earning reputation feels just like grinding experience points in an RPG, sometimes a bit too much so, but with all the unlocked parts and vehicles available, you’ll have a fine time at playing races over and over again just to build up a garage of cool and totally customized vehicles. In addition to the performance enhancing mods that affect your vehicle’s in-game stats, there are also a vast array of purely cosmetic alterations to choose from, including body kits, decals, tyre rims and even exhaust tips. It may sound shallow, but this degree of customization does give an undeniably intimate sense of connectedness and ownership with your chosen rides.

You start off in Los Angeles but once you’re mostly done there can start a brand new career in Tokyo. Both cities are fairly substantial in size, complete with complex highways, underground warrens and countryside shortcuts. Tokyo is the smaller of the two but is made harder by the fact that it’s riddled with narrow, twisty passages and sidestreets. The cities are gorgeous for a portable platform and filled with detail. There’s a real day-night cycle, traffic that varies according to the time of the day and even working traffic lights. There are no pedestrians however, which can be a good or bad thing depending on how much you like to run them down.

There’s no real plot in this game either, which is big net win for me since racing games shouldn’t be trying to tell epic stories. There’s still some mildy annoying trash talking and hearing the faux Japanese accents is especially hard on the ears, but nothing to worry about. The sense of control is perfect once you take some time to settle down with a scheme that you like. The races are exhilirating and once you get good, the feeling of weaving in and out through dense traffic and drifting across corners at maximum speed is downright sublime.

To make things a bit more interesting, in addition to the usual nitro speed boosts, each class of vehicle also has access to a unique ability that can be charged up during a race and used at critical moments. Tuners for example can enter a bullet time state to easily navigate the sharpest corners while luxury sedans can ram through traffic without slowing down. The game is difficult enough however that you pretty much have to use all of your abilities and skills to win, not to mention being familiar with all the best shortcuts. There’s no rubber-banding effect in the game, so if you’re really good enough, it’s possible to leave the AI opponents far, far behind, but the AI is generally very tough, being particularly good at dodging traffic and taking shortcuts.

My biggest disappointment is that the formula breaks down by the end of the game. The top exotics in the game can’t really be customized at all while the time trials, arguably the hardest races in the game, give you a fixed vehicle for that specific race, again withholding from you the option to choose which vehicle you want to race in and how to customize it. Combined with the punishing difficulty, that can seriously dissuade you from making the final push to beat the game. Still, by then you would have gotten countless hours of entertainment already.

Overall, I’d rate this as a solid racing title for the PSP and one particularly well suited for short stints of pick up and play sessions.