FlatOut: Ultimate Carnage (Xbox 360)

The main thing that strikes you straight away are the tracks and the obstacles that they bring. You rip around in three different race types, Derby, Street and Race, and each one is gorgeously animated and provides the driver with different routs. The freedom is so varied. Don’t want to stay on the main racing line? You don’t have to! you can take short cuts through petrol stations and side alleys, over the tops of buildings and through barns, the variety here is truly something fresh and new. The graphics as well are truly beautiful and you find yourself coming across something that you didn’t notice before on the way around.

You can earn credit by racing and this gives you the equivalent of money in the Flatout world. Depending on which type of event you want to race in you purchase the starter car to begin with (basically the pile of heap that just about runs) and then gain more credit through racing and events to get more credit and purchase more cars. Credit value doesn’t just stop with the cars either, each one can be tuned and tweaked to get the maximum performance out of each one. This sounds daunting at first but being mainly an arcade racer the upgrades are very simple. Each one shows on the bar what it does to the car and how it improves it, making this a very simple and easy process. Flatout is not concerned with spending hours fine tuning your weapon of choice, this is about good, straight forward smashing and racing so thankfully it leaves the high brow stuff Forza et al.

As well as the main career there are also fun side games that are always good for a laugh, Destruction Derbies being just one of them! There are the more bizarre ones though where your aim is to propel your driver out of the car in many different ways, be it baseball, high jump or even….i kid you not….curling! These provide a great laugh with friends participating as well and this action can all be taken online with Xbox Live.