Previews// FlatOut: Ultimate Carnage

I also kept crashing into walls and losing control of those essential high-speed nitro boosts because I was spending too many precious nano-seconds checking out what was at the side of the track or, perhaps most impressive visually, what was ahead in the far distance. But I soon stopped gazing off into the horizon and started getting the feel of what was required of me. Which was quite straightforward really – smash up the competition before they destroy you. Oh, and beat them to the finish line, preferably with four wheels intact when you get there.

FlatOut Ultimate Carnage boasts impressively realistic real-world modelled car physics and a good range of car upgrading options, but it can by no stretch of the imagination be labelled a car simulation.

For example, if you were to try to simulate the races in FlatOut Ultimate Carnage in real life, then you would be dead in around nine seconds flat. Also, in real life, after a serious car crash you cannot just press the [Y] button and be immediately returned to your (increasingly) battered vehicle as if by magic. Which is a bit of a shame, really, as it would remove the need for the hospitals, pain and tragedy – you know, those bits about real-world car crashing that just suck.

No, this is an arcade smash’em’up that just happens to feature 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.

Driving like a psychopath in FlatOut Ultimate Carnage is also positively encouraged, as the more bits of your surrounding environment you manage to destroy - 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 up your car by buying upgrades as you progress through the various urban, backwoods and raceway-based tracks. The 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 minigames.

While I didn’t get to try the game out online, I was informed that players on Xbox Live will be able to get involved in both ranked and unranked online races as well as being able to structure customised tournaments and muck about with competitive ragdoll driver flinging mini-games. There’s no reason to imagine it not being as solid an online experience as it is a very polished single player game. But I'll withhold judgement until I've actually seen it in action.

FlatOut Ultimate Carnage releases in the UK later in June exclusively for Xbox 360, developed by Bugbear Entertainment and published by Empire Interactive.