Gee, it must be hard being a car racing gangsta playa. I mean, all that money, the mansions, cars and free flowing booze and women. In L.A. Rush you play as Trikz Lane, one such individual who is a dominant figure on the west coast street racing scene. Of course, Trikz's big mouth soon earns the wrath of another big player, who promptly steals all of his beautiful cars whilst he is off practicing in Maui for a huge racing syndicate. Poor guy.

This is the premise for L.A. Rush ' you must start from the lowest of the lowest, and try and find all of your stolen rides in time for the big comp. Not content to just contact the police and tell them he's been robbed, Trikz embraces this hard and long road willingly. There's no real emotional depth to Trikz, he's a melting pot of stereotypes: rich, racially ambiguous, cocky, and irresponsible. It's hard to feel sorry for the main character when he's so shallow.

But this is a driving game, and the story is only there to frame the races that you need to complete to progress through the game. You're offered quite a few options to begin with; you can hop right into the story mode or a quick race, and you can even choose what type of soundtrack you would like for the game ' hip hop, techno, or rock.

You'll start out with some pretty crappy cars, but it's not long before you get a call from your best buddy, who just happens to know where one of your stolen cars is hidden. L.A. Rush follows a very predictable pattern ' earn cash through a street race, then enter a race through the city, then get a call about one of your cars, then go take the car and get it back to your mansion with as little damage as possible.

This would actually be quite acceptable, but L.A. Rush is a game that is obsessed with money. You see, for anything that is not a low level race, you're charged an entrance fee, which is rarely cheap. For example, you may win $3000 if you win the race, but it costs $1500 to enter. I don't understand why they didn't just scrap the entrance fee structure and make the prize money $1500.

The entrance fee also removes any kind of experimentation from the gameplay. You're hardly going to go actively searching for a short cut if you've got hard earned cash resting on the result of the race. Short cuts are there, and even some big jumps off the back of trucks, but you're unlikely to want to risk crashing just for a bit of fun. Unlike similar checkpoint-based racing games, such as Midnight Club 3, getting to know the track becomes an expensive and frustrating process, as you're forced to replay all the low level races to get enough money to compete in story missions.

The missions where you win back your stolen cars, and hence get to race them, are actually quite fun. Once you've found one of your pilfered cars, you have to get it back to your mansion, and there are often five or six opponents aggressively ramming and pushing you around as you attempt to do so. This forces you to speed through the streets and take last minute short cuts. Unfortunately, as soon as you get back to your mansion, you have to pay for any damage you caused ' which is as baffling a game mechanic as the race entrance fee. Why force the player to drive recklessly and then punish them when they damage the car, surely that twisted logic goes against everything that the Rush series is known for?

It's fortunate that you don't have to pay every time you wreck your car, as it will happen a lot. Races are hectic affairs and don't always run smoothly. You have predictably aggressive opponents to deal with, not to mention the cops (who will get more aggressive you as your 'wanted' level increases) and the road traffic. When you do crash, the game treats you to a Burnout style slow motion cinematic. Unfortunately, the crash mechanic is inconsistent. One minute you'll be plowing through traffic and the next your car will become a crushed tin can as you just clip the back end of a car. And then your car is magically fixed anyway!

There seems to be way too much traffic, and often you will be frustrated as cars and trucks pull into the race path and block the way. Cops will come after you for any minor infringement ' even if they were the ones who ran into you! They are relatively harmless and more of an annoyance than a hindrance, and if you do get arrested you simply have to pay a fine ' yet another punishment involving money.

While we're flogging the money theme ' the developers obviously thought, 'Hey, let's allow the gamer to 'pimp' their rides'. But don't actually allow them to personally customize anything; instead, you're told the cost of an upgrade, with no specifics of what will be done, and then the game automatically upgrades your car. Sure, they look pretty cool, but if you don't like what the game gives you then you have to reload or hope that the next upgrade is cooler.

All these points that I've raised may all sound quite negative, but L.A. Rush has a few things going for it. Firstly, it looks nice. Cars are impressively modeled (though they seem a bit too shiny) and driving is a smooth and effortless affair. It's quite intuitive to drift around corners and then gun the accelerator. There is a screen-shaking effect at top speed which gives a good sensation of speed. Also, the day/night cycle is a nice touch, and it's pretty cool to cruise 'round Hollywood at night imagining you just caught a glimpse of Matt 'Matt Damon' Damon. The huge map means a lot of effort has gone into giving you a lot of road to burn, and garages and races are fairly evenly distributed throughout each suburb.

If the back cover blurb is to be believed, over 350 miles of L.A. freeways and streets have been faithfully recreated. I don't know L.A., but the game is bloody huge. However, much of it is very generic, and flat, featureless roads abound. There are rarely moments of landmark recognition, and there are no secret things to collect, therefore exploring the city gets pretty old very quickly. With such a big world, the map becomes very handy, and you can even place a GPS marker for places you want to go ' and the mini map will then highlight the fastest route to your destination. This is great, but it becomes quite difficult to pay attention to both the map and the traffic jams that stymie any attempt at a smooth driving line.

Ultimately, L.A. Rush feels like a derivative of every other arcade racer out there ' mix some of San Andreas' open areas, sprinkle a little checkpoint-based racing, stir in Burnout's crash scenes and bake with African American hip hop culture. However, the resulting game is not a sum of its parts, as it fails to add anything new to the genre. Where's the cool stuff? We want more than nitro and generic street layouts, and there's a real lack of distinctive originality in this title.