There’s a moment in the events that lead up to a car accident that you’re in the process of causing, a fraction of a second where you realise there is absolutely nothing you can do to stop it. It’s a moment of pure, clarified adrenaline where your reactions are an exercise in damage limitation. It’s bloody frightening and we wouldn’t recommend it to anyone. However, put this in a videogames context – thus removing the potential for maiming and injury, the stress of dealing with the chopsy chav whose single most prized possession you’ve just written off, the insurance hassles and majority of the abject terror – and you’re onto something more thrilling.

It’s not that we want to detract from Forza or Colin McRae, but serious racing games can be a bit… well, serious sometimes. Great if you want your vehicle to be accurate down to the size and pattern of its wheel bolts and you enjoy the advanced driving course required just to start the engine. Not so good if you just want to hare around a track and smash the crap out of other cars. Forza 2 has been on the shelves for over a month now and serious racing has the market firmly in its grip. We need an antidote – the balance must be restored. Bring on FlatOut Ultimate Carnage.

In its anarchic style, the Xbox’s FlatOut 2 was the antithesis of everything the Forza series represents, prizing aggression and destruction above driving skill and rewarding it accordingly. It gave two fingers to the genre and didn’t give a f*** for fancy decals and gleaming chrome. The same can be said about Ultimate Carnage, because it’s almost exactly the same game, just a hell of a lot prettier with roughly triple the polygon count of its predecessor and an HD facelift. This alone is usually reason enough to sink our teeth into a game and rip it to pieces, but Bugbear has done a remarkable job updating the visuals and besides, we still really like playing FlatOut. And what’s not to like? Try as you might, if you originally enjoyed the visceral thrill you get from launching your vehicle at another in an attempt to wreck it, then you’re still going to love it. Plus, if you weren’t lucky enough to play FlatOut – or any of the Burnout, Full Auto or Destruction Derby games – and you were one of those mindlessly destructive children we were (the kind of kid who used to simulate car crashes by pounding their toy cars with a rock until it was suitably mangled) then you will absolutely love this.

FlatOut’s main game is a race of sorts, graded according to the speed and type of car. There are three main race types: Derby, Race and Street, graded according to the speed and cost of the vehicle, and while the speed that the top-flight cars afford you is attractive, we prefer slumming it in the Derby class with a rusty truck any day. It just seems more appropriate to throw a decrepit banger around a muddy track than a turtle-waxed chick magnet. Besides, what the beefier vehicles lack in speed they more than make up for in weight, especially nitropropelled weight when thrust into the side of that prissy race-class vehicle.

In retrospect there really isn’t much of a race here to speak of at all. Every course, bar the first two in each event type, is unlocked by ranking first, second or third out of 12 in the preceding course, but this is the only reason that we really wanted to actually race in each event. Not only is it more fun to ram other vehicles off the road, target a specific car for wrecking and generally trash your environment, Ultimate Carnage actively rewards you for it. Key to your gameplay experience is acquiring nitro, which turns your game from a heart-pounding thrill to the equivalent of mainlining a triple espresso. This is gained not via a pickup or by purchasing it in a store prior to the race, but ironically, by colliding with absolutely anything with a surface vaguely perpendicular to the road. Hit another car and score a bit of nitro. Drive through a fence and score a bit more. Hit a ramp, launch 20 feet in the air, miss the road and land on your roof, and you’ll likely max the flaming nitro bar out.

If being rewarded with that extra hit of adrenaline doesn’t compel you to turn your banger into a speeding missile, then the financial rewards you’ll reap will certainly be incentive enough. Take a typical Derby race: completing that in first place will net you in the region of $2,500, a respectable amount that should buy you a couple of upgrades. But apply a little perseverance to wreck another competitor or two, trash enough scenery and limp in sixth or seventh for each course, and you’ll easily land several times that amount. Plus, destruction is a vocation in itself that takes up far too much time for you to race effectively, so you’re either a speed freak and a pauper, or a carnage king and minted. There’s no having your cake and eating it. Not that the racing part isn’t fun of course, it’s just far too much fun to take a substantial lead with a 4x4 you’ve upgraded to the hilt, before making a U-turn and careering headlong into the rest of the pack, annihilating every speed machine who had the sheer audacity to think about scratching your rustwork up.

Skip the main events and you’ll discover FlatOut gives up any pretence of a race altogether. Carnage mode compiles a series of events that makes a mockery of serious racing; it’s hedonism for those who delight in the creativity of destruction and its gimmickry is great to watch and even better to play. Several of these games involve a rocket-propelled car with (what we hope is) a crash-test dummy inside, requiring you to speed down a runway, avoid obstacles, brake hard and launch the ‘dummy’ through the windscreen to achieve specific goals. You need to knock as many pins down as possible in Bowling, skim that dummy across a pool in Stone Skipping and even draw a high poker hand by knocking giant cards off hooks in Royal Flush. It’s completely irreverent and will appeal in particular to those who enjoy watching men being blown out of cannons in the circus and monster truck shows with robot dinosaurs. Homer Simpson would delight in it.

However, easily the most visceral fun we had with Carnage mode was the Deathmatch Derby. Heralding back to the days of the full-blown PC game of the same name, Deathmatch Derby puts you in the hot seat of a beefy truck, places you in an arena with 11 other vehicles and instructs you to land whatever insurance broker who was brave enough to cover you, with enough claims to sink their underwriters – and the first 20 seconds should be enough.

The free-for-all begins with every car hammering it, full throttle into the centre of the arena, the inevitable result being one almighty, explosive holocaust of metal and several vehicles being written off before they even have a chance to select a specific target. Points are scored according to how much damage you inflict on other cars and there’s a 50 point-per-second bonus for any driver who has lasted the longest without being wrecked. You also have three lives and the opportunity to pick up other bonuses, such as Infinite Nitro, Power Ram and Repair Boost, which should increase your longevity in Destruction Derby should you survive the ruck in picking them up.

But why get yourself dogged down with these details when all Destruction Derby is about is giving your opponents an intimate introduction with the arena wall using the ram on the front of your truck? Which brings us back to our original point. It doesn’t matter how much you gloss it up, add new features and extend the multiplayer; the kind of gamer who revelled in trying to fulfil their insatiable destructive streak, will soon look beyond the initial draw of the extended destructibility and the added Achievements awards, and tap back into what they enjoyed about FlatOut in the first place: carnage. Ignore the fact that this is a very similar game in terms of gameplay content, it’s of little consequence; Ultimate Carnage is so compulsive it’s still worth buying on the 360 for that alone. For FlatOut virgins, Ultimate Carnage has to be an essential purchase and who knows, the next time someone cuts you up, perhaps you’ll be less inclined to ram that Nova monstrosity off the road and trash his ridiculous wide-bore exhaust and stupid spoiler. Or maybe we mean more inclined. Yes, that’s exactly what we mean.

Ben Biggs