"Borrowing" much of its game from two of the strongest game franchises out there (i.e., God of War and Devil May Cry), you would think that Ghost Rider for PSP would be a decent if derivative portable game. Alas, you'd be wrong. Really, really wrong.

The game's story picks up where the movie leaves off. Johnny's soul still belongs to Mephisto but, as it turns out, Mephisto's son, Blackheart, has escaped to earth and is threatening to start the apocalypse. Johnny is offered the chance to use his Ghost Rider powers to take out Blackheart and co.; his girlfriend will be sucked into hell and become Mephisto's play thing should he decline.

As mentioned, Ghost Rider blatantly "borrows" the hack n' slash fighting style of God of War while unashamedly incorporating the levelling system of collecting souls of slain demons as seen in the Devil May Cry series.

As for the fighting, there are enough button mashing combos to keep things relatively interesting for the first bit, but you end up attaining the most powerful combo quite early on, which makes the rest of the game astonishingly easy as you rip through non-impressive foe after non-impressive foe, only using alternate moves to ward off tedium or to crank up the combo meter for a task-specific move, like busting through an enemy shield.

Visually, the game verges on nightmare -- and not in the hellish, thematic sense of the movie (and the Ghost Rider comic books it's based on), but just horrible in the letdown sense of the word. Blurry, dingy, underachieving backgrounds over scored by excessively orange and yellow explosiveness and pock-marked by cookie-cutter enemies... maybe five different enemies in all, not counting the bosses, straight out of the cookie jar appearing incessantly throughout the game, like somebody's budget ran out so five draft baddies were inserted.

Audio is a mixed bag; the cracking of the chain and shotgun blasts are great but the dialogue way too quiet while enemies charging toward you are way too loud, so you're constantly adjusting the volume, which is frustrating because it's adds an element of button juggling that has nothing to do with gameplay.

Movie- and comic book-based games are prone to suffering from unattainable expectations of fans that know the material, but Ghost Rider for PSP doesn't even aspire to meet basic association. In fact, the only thing Ghost Rider does with any consistency is illustrate what's wrong with movie-based games publishing in the first place.