Megastunt Mayhem

As you might have guessed from its title, theme, and presentation, Megastunt Mayhem is not a subtle or particularly nuanced experience.

To the sound of thrashed electric guitars, you select your testosterone-fuelled monster truck from a variety of brashly named candidates. Then, having clambered into its garish cab, you're let loose in an arena full of ramps and rings of fire.

Career mode is the game's main event, and it's made up of thee separate truckin' disciplines, with Freestyle, Destruction, and Smashpoint modes serving up a surprisingly diverse, but consistently raucous, selection of game types.

A set of tutorials eases you gently into the Freestyle mode, which serves up the unlikely marriage of monster trucks and Tony Hawk's Pro Skater-style arcade trickery.

It's messy and occasionally quite frustrating, but the bonkers exuberance of it all wins you over. Launching a nitrous-fuelled jump into a double frontflip before landing on a grind rail (yes, you can grind your monster truck) is such an unwieldy spectacle that you can't help but grin.

Your efforts are then judged by the game's five-star rating system, which awards up to three stars for your score and reserves the final two for those who complete level-specific objectives. In Freestyle mode, these objectives are usually specific stunts to incorporate into your run.

This system puts more pressure on the game's stunt controls than they can bear, though, and failed attempts at five-star runs are too often the result of the controls' inadequacies rather than the player's.

Destruction mode is fractionally less divorced from reality than Freestyle, awarding points for targeted demolition rather than for sick grinds.

As such, you roll over cars and smash through billboards to delight fans and keep your score counter ticking over. Here, level objectives task you with destroying specific in-game objects to earn those five-star ratings.

You might have to give the jumbotron a good ram, for instance, or power through a barn wall, and while there's certainly a destructive thrill to be had, there's also a distinct lack of challenge. Once you spot your target in the compact arena, you drive into it. Job done.

The Smashpoint mode is also on the easy side, tasking you with racing from point to point against the clock. Generous time-limits and over-sensitive handling collide to create gameplay that's challenging for all of the wrong reasons.

That said, the fact that each checkpoint is a physical object for you to crash into is a pleasing touch, and it's one of many considered design decisions that give Megastunt Mayhem its rough-around-the-edges charm. It's a game that's easy to criticise, but hard to dislike.

Even as you breeze through unbalanced challenges, with your plain-sailing progress only occasionally halted by control issues, there's still plenty to enjoy. The sheer irony-free energy of the experience makes it feel something like the video game equivalent of Andrew W.K.

With its selection of imperfect gametypes, you could quite justifiably call Megastunt Mayhem a jack of all trades and master of none. But what it lacks in polish, focus, and precision, it makes up for in pure dumb fun.