With your hard earned cash you can place decals, change the paint color, or add on new hardware to improve the plane’s performance. New hardware augments the three stats available to planes which are agility, speed, and performance. What’s also cool about these upgrades is that they actually add 3D models onto your plane when you buy them. With a completely tricked out plane you’re going to have fins on nearly every single surface available. The same goes for decals as you can place them on a huge amount of surfaces all over the plane if you so choose.


Shoot him!
When you’re not upgrading or unlocking things in career mode you can play a local WiFi match or enter Arcade mode for a quick round of action. While it is disappointing that there is no online play, the game does allow for sharing so you only need one UMD for up to 8 people to duke it out against each other. The multiplayer allows for a huge amount of settings to customize and you can of course race or participate in a dog fight. It’s a lot of fun if you can actually manage to round up enough live bodies that all own PSP’s.


Lock on for the kill.
Finally there is Challenge mode which is pretty much career mode but more focused on some kind of event. There are several tiers all consisting of five challenges which include MACH Mele, MACH Dash, Time Check, MACH LAP and Dog Tag. It’s a decently fun addition but after the lengthy career mode I personally had to take a couple days off before attempting this as I was just plain sick of MACH at that point.

The graphics of MACH are quite good all around for the PSP. Everything looks like it fits together and the many airplane models look unique and stylish. Environments are modeled well and effects look fine. On the other hand while the game does have its own lengthy soundtrack, the sound coming through the PSP speakers sounds grainy and pretty awful. A lot of the effects made me wince a few times.

It’s a decent racing and dogfight hybrid that will appeal to some but leave many others feeling a bit let down by the repetitiveness and the lack of online play.


All menus are in Japanese but otherwise it's fine.

• Lots to unlock
  
• Fun controls
  
• Racing and dogfights

• No online
  
• Very repetitive
  
• Sound at some points is quite bad