Fired Up

Each 'arena' casts you as a specific resistance fighter, each with their own signature vehicle, such as Addo's speedy Pick-up truck or Erik's nimble dune buggy. There's also a 'garage' on each level where you can 'tag-out' to change to another member of the resistance or back again, ultimately giving you a choice of two vehicles to play with.

The driving is very straight-forward and easy to pick-up, which is essential when you're going to be concentrating on defending yourself with your turret mounted weaponry. The wheeled vehicles are armed with an inexhaustible machine gun as standard, while the tanks default to a powerful cannon, but more powerful weapons lay scattered around the arenas.

To access the heavy ordnance, take on the Fired Up missions. These are a simple matter of destroying a Fired Up truck, then taking out enough enemies in the time limit without dying yourself. Succeed and new weapons and power-ups become available, repeat the process and you'll gain access to the most powerful pick-ups such as Bombs and Lasers.

The car's the star

You'll need all the firepower you can get as the levels are expansive and packed with enemies. You'll be burning rubber through sweeping mountain vistas, rubble strewn urban wastelands and imposing Cold War cityscapes.

Against these bleak backgrounds the colourful vehicles of the resistance really stand-out. Flames streak down the side of Addo's truck and Tim's bright blue tank is a sight to behold. All the vehicles are very detailed, even down to the individual shock absorbers on Isabel's Frame Buggy and the tanks look suitably terrifying as they rumble over everything in their path.

Armoured People Carrier

But as frantic and fun as the solo game is, multiplayer is where Fired Up's strength really lies. Up to eight players can go head-to-head via PSP's Wireless connection. 13 multiplayer challenges await, spread across five themed levels.

Hardware players should be familiar with Arctic, Quarry, Mayan and Ruins, and the all-new industrial Junkyard level. Add in the choice of Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, Capture the Flag, Bomb the Base, Assimilation, Race, King of the Hill and Team KotH you can see there's a bucket-load of multiplayer goodness squeezed onto the UMD.

More than the sum of its parts

As well as playing against other Fired Up addicts, you can play a demo of the game with friends who don't own the game thanks to the PSP's Game Sharing ability. Great value for money.

And the value keeps getting better, because SCEE has already released downloadable content for Fired Up on our sister site www.yourpsp.com . An extra multiplayer map is available right now, and no doubt even more content will arrive over the coming months.

It's a pity there aren't more customisation options on the vehicles - even the option to change the base colour would be nice - and more multiplayer maps wouldn't go amiss, but as it stands Fired Up is still a compact bundle of fun. It's not going to win a place in Mensa, but for sheer, no-brain, run-and-gun enjoyment you're going to be hard pressed to find something hotter than Fired Up.