You take a somewhat average road race game – in terms of play, then spice up the “scenery” and you have a game that cuts through the wide swath of demographics to target one group.

Hooters Road Trip, an Ubi Soft and Hoplite Research release for the PlayStation, has decent racing graphics, and a variety of vehicles with a variety of control quirks. It also has girls from Hooters featured in cutscenes to beckon, welcome or cheer drivers.

Guess what demographic group this game is targeted for?

The game is played in terms of road trips, and depending on how well you do, you can unlock cars (there are 16 cars to choose from, including seven bonus cars), license them and use them for the next road trip. Each road trip begins over the same ground, and as you get to the latter of the six, you begin to move across the country. Each stop along the way will treat the driver to a welcome from one of the Hooters’ girls.

For example, in the first road trip, you will run a two-stage race; with part one from Ft. Lauderdale to Jacksonville, and part two is from Jacksonville to Atlanta. When you get up to road trip number 6, you begin with the Ft. Lauderdale-Jacksonville run, followed by the Jacksonville-Atlanta race. Then you stage across the country to New Orleans, Corpus Christi, Phoenix, Las Vegas and finally Santa Monica. Of course, the cutscenes never change and you will get the same welcome to Atlanta (“sugah”) as you will to Phoenix (yep, after a grueling road race, nothing sounds better than a plate of hot wings).

All that aside, though, the game does play reasonably well. Traffic will flow in both directions, which presents a problem simply because you are racing on U.S. highways and byways. Collisions are not very well rendered. And the vehicles you need to pass are as repetitive as the stretches of road.

The game is filled with cutscenes, which displays some of Hooters’ best assets.

Control elements can be configured in four ways, but are generally quite simple to understand – presenting little in the way of a learning curve. The vehicle you select is controlled by the D-pad, and there doesn’t seem to be an option that allows that control to be taken over by the thumbstick.

Unlocking a car is not a guaranteed path to victory. Some of the cars are very hard to control, simply because they turn on a dime and can have you careening across the road with just a breath of a touch on the control pad.

The game’s sound is a mixed bag. Yes, the cutscenes are well done, and the roar of the engine is fine. No matter what vehicle you have, the honk of the horn is exactly the same – very wimpy.

Hooters Road Trip is a mindless driving game with a host of repetitious features. While graphically average, the game retreads the same ground over and over. But taking an otherwise average race game, and trying to spice it up with sexist images is demeaning and silly. Even the game states that it is tacky, yet unrefined. That about sums it up.

Gameplay: 4
This game is quite repetitious, even for an arcade-style game. You enter a stage race, and if you do well, you can unlock a car. But to use it, you have to license it, which means driving the same test track, with the same intro cutscene, under the same conditions, et cetera. The only thing that really changes is the car’s handling ability.

Graphics: 6
The environments have numerous repeated elements, but they are solid. You can view the race from different perspectives (several follow and front fender modes), which gives a nice variety.

Sound: 6
There are some serious hard-driving tunes in this game. You can set up the song you wish to hear for the race you are running. The horn is wimpy, and the crash sounds are a little lame..

Difficulty: Easy
The challenge lies in controlling the vehicles, and the game does have several difficulty settings to appeal to players of most abilities.

Concept: 3
The only thing this game does well or different in this category is knowing its target audience and playing up to it.

Multiplayer: N/A

Overall: 4
The game does have some clipping problems (if you hit a tunnel, you can see through to the other side), but overall does a nice job of rendering average racing elements. Of course,  this game panders to males in an overtly sexist way, and is too repetitive to be interesting