FlatOut Ultimate Carnage is perhaps one of the best examples of the smash-em up ‘Destruct-O-Racer’ genre to date. The first two outings in the FlatOut series have been well received and it’s fair to say that they have been good, solid racing games, which have appealed to fans of (virtually) smashing up cars. Basically, they did pretty much what they claimed on the box – deliver a smash-tastic arcade driving experience that involved lots of skidding about, crashing into both the other cars an ... more >>

FlatOut Ultimate Carnage is perhaps one of the best examples of the smash-em up ‘Destruct-O-Racer’ genre to date. The first two outings in the FlatOut series have been well received and it’s fair to say that they have been good, solid racing games, which have appealed to fans of (virtually) smashing up cars. Basically, they did pretty much what they claimed on the box – deliver a smash-tastic arcade driving experience that involved lots of skidding about, crashing into both the other cars and the destructible buildings dotted around the tracks and, most satisfyingly of all, flinging your ragdoll driver out through the windscreen in a range of hilarious mini-games (ragdoll bowling, ragdoll darts and so on).

FlatOut Ultimate Carnage has been rebuilt from the ground up and specifically developed to squeeze the best out of the Xbox 360. The game features twelve cars racing on screen at any one time, five all-new single player and two all-new multiplayer game modes over Xbox Live, and an amazing 8,000 dynamic and fully-smashable objects on each track for you to run over and smash the hell out of: tyre stacks you can scatter across the track, cardboard boxes, lampposts inviting you to destroy them - so you can smash to smithereens pretty much anything and everything you see on and around the track. The graphics, lighting and shadowing in the game really stand out, making each smash, crash and buckle just that little bit more deliciously naughty.

FlatOut Ultimate Carnage is a superbly fun and highly polished arcade smash’em’up that just happens to feature some impressively realistic physics - cars that feel and behave in many ways like normal cars feel. Well, like normal cars would feel if you were an insane psychopath with a death-wish.

In addition to smashing up your competitors at every possible opportunity - the more your nitro bar increases and – ultimately – the faster and more destructive you become. Bear in mind that each car has 25,000 polygons and 40 separate individually destructible parts and you get a good idea of how battered most of these cars look if they manage to make it to the third and final lap of a race, when the surrounding track environments really do look like something from a Mad Max movie.

There are three types of car class on offer in the game: the beginner rust-buckets in the Derby class, the slightly more presentable (and much more powerful) Street class cars, and the behemoths in the Race class. There is also a host of different single player and multiplayer modes.

The single-player experience boasts both a traditional career mode, where you can progressively pimp your car by buying upgrades as you progress through the various urban, backwoods and raceway-based tracks. Then there's Carnage mode, which is self-explanatory. It is aimed at the player who wants a quick fix of high-adrenalin carnage races and, yep, some of those hilarious ragdoll driver flinging mini-games.

Finally the multiplayer mode on Xbox Live includes ranked and unranked online races as well as fully customisable tournaments and competitive ragdoll driver flinging mini-games. << less