Ever since that Top Gear episode where Richard Hammond and Jeremy Clarkson were playing football with Toyota Aygo cars, it had me thinking. Wouldn’t it be cool to play football with cars? Now, in terms of videogames it’s something that has been done before, via mini games in a few ridiculously bad shovel ware games, Penny Racer comes to mind. To throw the idea into a fully fledged title on the PSN and it to do well, it had to be spectacularly great to ever stand chance of half decent reviews. After all there are plenty of conventional football games that consumers could just fall back to if it the experience is unsavoury. Fortunately Psyonix has got it right, an inadvertently created an online community for this game, that seems to flourish week on week.

So, the main premise of the game is a tournament based single player campaign on controlling aerobatic stunt based rocket powered cars, which have nitro strapped to their arse and have the ability to jump and fly throughout the variety of pitch arenas. You have to get a big metallic football into your opponents, goal areas to score points and win matches. The duration of these matches are only a few minutes at a time, but they create a nice competitive play which ranges from 1vs1, 2vs2, 3vs3 and 4vs4. There are 13 tournaments in total, which sometimes pits you against an unfair advantage of having less players but the A.I is never hard enough to make it a frustrating affair.

You can unlock cars in the game through scoring high amount of stars which are rewarding for beating target scores on mini-games or scoring a decent amount of goals on tournaments. Each car has different properties, either being muscular or having better manoeuvrability. 7 cars in total can be unlocked, with the 7th require you to hone your offline skills well enough to pick up the last car. To add more gusto to the replay value, the game offers a variety of trophies with some of them stemming you into the online play to unlock, a nice added touch.

Graphically the game is well presented and Psyonix treated those who bought the game to two added maps over the last few months. One of them set on a pirate ship and one on a traditional football pitch, hoorah! What makes this game so addictive is the skill involved in the game, to be a scoring machine you will need to judge the balls height, where it’s likely to rebound and also the aerobatics of the car that will give you, at times a stunning goal. Worried about missing that special moment? Fear not, this game gives you an automatic replay upload straight to YouTube, for online play anyway, how cool is that?

Speaking of online, Psyonix have ironed out the initial bugs that surrounded the online play, they are now fixed and matchmaking is incredibly smooth. If you ever experience lag, it’s not the servers, it’s more likely the idiot downloading horse porn. The matchmaking feature is nice as it’ll often pit you against players ranked around your skill level it’s nowhere near as accurate as Halo 3’s Trueskill ™ but good enough to stop you being raped by the car football elite. Online play isn’t hugely tactical not unless you play team based games, another new feature added by Psyonix after the community called for it, it’s a testament to the company as they now have a community base large enough to probably make some added buck by introducing micro-transactions, but they didn’t. There is something that makes me wish this game was on XBLA though, given that the PSN is inferior to Microsoft’s Live behemoth, as I know that this game wouldn’t rest in the grave of redundant, un played Arcade titles.

Some of the mini games are a tad boring, such as the power slide challenge and the nitro collection challenge, but other than that the 18 other mini games are pretty cool to come back to. If you wanted more of an incentive to purchase this title, then look no further than the split-screen multiplayer. No frame rate slow down, insanely addictive and leaves you with an evil chuckle when you make your opponent explode.

Overall Psyonix’s ridiculously long titled driving-football crossbreed is well worth the purchase, its online community is vibrant and its open ended learning experience and easy to use tutorial system makes it one of the most entertaining pieces of downloadable content on Sony’s Playstation 3.