WRC: FIA World Rally Championship games haven't made much of a splash in North America, where the sport is less popular and Travis Pastrana is its only genuinely well-known competitor, but they're big news in Europe. MotorStorm developer Evolution Studios cut its teeth on the first four WRC titles that provided an accurate rendition of the rallying world and a stupendously fun racing title.

This is the first game of the series to appear on PSP, though, and I've been intrigued to see how such a huge game would translate to Sony's premier portable. Luckily, there's plenty to hold your interest — a full Championship program as well as the ability to race single rallies and individual stages or to attack the game in time-trial mode.

First things first: This game won't have the 30-kilometer stages and huge events that real rallies have; there just isn't the space on a UMD. Nevertheless, there's a full World Championship mode available. Picking from six different manufacturers and 12 different drives, there are a maximum of four stages available for each of the 16 rallies, which cover locations as diverse as Japan, Australia and Argentina.

The easier game modes offer two stages per rally, with the harder modes offering the four full stages. Races themselves have been somewhat compressed. Instead of driving by yourself, you're let loose on a stage and tasked with catching up with more than a dozen ghost cars driven by numerous real rally drivers in a style somewhat reminiscent of one of the PSP's other great driving games: Ridge Racer. Oddly, you have to finish in fifth place or above to progress to the next stage, but the points-scoring system from the real sport has been preserved here.

The stages themselves are based on real WRC roads and offer plenty of challenge. You'll find sweeping, snow-driven corners in Sweden, tight, tarmac-covered technical sections in Italy and the world-famous yumps in tree-lined Finland. There's plenty of variety and, especially later on, finishing fifth in each stage becomes genuinely challenging, and the arbitrary nature of this limit seems to matter less.

Handling is definitely at the arcade end of the scale. Cars can be thrown around corners with terrifying ease, they recover from spins and jumps like WWE wrestlers, and the visual damage your car takes doesn't seem to have a huge effect on your vehicle's performance. The handling is, perhaps, a little too sensitive. A quick tap of the analogue stick will see your car thrown around a corner with wild abandon, but it's easy to adapt to the careful, throttle-tapping and steering-tweaking philosophy of rally driving. It's just something you'll have to get used to, and the game is markedly better when you do.

It's a good-looking game, too. Stages can sometimes be barren but also are often crammed with detail — villages and town squares with houses, shops, waterfalls and spectators parked next to the road and crowding to get a glimpse of your car. The world may be flashing past you at 200km/h, but it's still an extremely attractive world. It also helps that the WRC travels globally, which means there's plenty of variety in your surroundings.

The one major disappointment of WRC for PSP is the sound. Your co-driver barks orders well enough, but the numerous in-game sound effects leave a lot to be desired. Your engine sounds less like a 200bhp powerhouse and more like a bee in a bucket, and skidding around the world's roads often sounds like sandpaper as opposed to gravel. The soundtrack also consists of a mere six songs, and there's no option to shuffle them or add more. It's worth turning off the music to save your sanity.

Thankfully, though, this is the only black mark for an extremely impressive racing game. The World Championship mode is extremely engrossing; the numerous cars, rallies and locations offer plenty of variety; and it's simply a lot of fun — and a decent challenge, too. WRC could be a good stepping stone to trying one of the more full-on WRC games that are still worth playing on PlayStation 2, but it's also a fine game in its own right — and worth buying for any PSP-owning race fan.