You remember that Gary Numan song, Cars? It goes like this: “here in my car, I feel safest of all.” Then he sings about some other stuff, but no one remembers what, so everyone sings that one line then starts awkwardly humming along to the tune, as they forget the words and slowly get quieter and quieter in shame. Anyway! Cars. It’s Gary Numan’s ode to this film licence of the same name because Cars is the safest PSP game you’ll ever play. Ever.

There’s nothing wrong with it. You race against other cars, you’ll try to finish first, you’ll jostle for position, you’ll do what you do in all racing games and you’ll risk scraping the wall rather than actually using the brakes. There are inventive shortcuts to find, such as the lorry that drops a small ramp midway through a race or the fire engine that puts out the trackside flames where you hit a nearby bell, allowing you to pass through safely. Not the sort of stuff to make you wet your Murray Walker pants in excitement but no real problem with it either. Likewise, the turbo boost and jumps add some variation to the game itself.

This is probably just as well because Cars is so incredibly safe, there’s no real pull to it either. There’s really nothing to hook your interest. Each car has its own weight, so it can hit other cars off the road, and… that’s it. That’s the only technique to learn with any sort of depth to it, so you’ll spend most of your time holding down accelerate, pressing left or right occasionally, listening to Owen Wilson sleepwalk his way through his lines. It’s fluff, it’s filler but hey! It’s for kids. And kids like this kind of stuff.

That leaves Cars as this year’s winner of The Safest PSP Game Award, which doesn’t actually exist and thus proves Play has more creativity than Locomotive Studios. Cars doesn’t show any ambition or take any risks, so there’s really nothing to backfire. It’s just kind of… there. Kids will like it and this is aimed at kids, given that it’s easy enough for older hands to sail through it in an afternoon’s sitting. So for Cars and its incredible safeness, it gets a nice safe 60 score. Fair’s fair.

Ryan King