When it comes to the career aspirations of anybody’s inner child, respected stuntman usually ranks just behind astronaut and sweet factory quality control. Sadly, though, time brings cruel wisdom. The doctorate in astrophysics gets lost in a haze of booze and absent dedication while mountains of confectionery simply remind you of the massive comedown after all that sugar. Give thanks, then, for Paradigm, whose output can satisfy the part of your mind always screaming ‘just one more’, rather than that warning of impending doom.

As is custom, Stuntman: Ignition casts you in the role of a Hollywood precision driver, taking on the kind of jumps, rolls and near misses that would see more valuable individuals killed instantly. Obviously the specifics are given a wide berth, the action instead spread across a handful of movies that are similar to (but legally distinct from!) James Bond, Batman, Dukes Of Hazzard and the like. So, during the five hours or so it’ll take to fill out a bog-standard acting CV, you’ll be piloting flighty prototype hovercrafts through military bunkers, smashing through countless ornate windows and, um, barrel-rolling through crates of chickens. The Outsider this most definitely ain’t.

Each film’s work is divided again into half-a-dozen separate stunts, rated on a five-star system denoting how much you nearly ended up dead. Aside from the list of director-ordered stunts, you see, comes a detritus of charred vehicles, open spaces and dangerous-looking posts to drift around and narrowly avoid, keeping your combination of tricks alive and vastly improving the overall total. Turn your run into one long hair-raising ride, naturally enough, and an automatic five-star rating will be yours, as well as the adulation of top directors worldwide. You’d just better have a high pain threshold…

If there’s one thing Stuntman: Ignition can’t be accused of, it’s taking things too seriously – after all, one major side effect of the included arena editor is to expose its outrageous, heavily stacked physics as an unquestionable sham. Fall a couple of hundred feet through the air, landing only on your rear wheel – not a scratch. Try a loop the loop and your rider simply uses the top of his head as a contact point. None of this matters, however, the second that action call is made, when the barriers standing in your way turn to glorious opportunities.

After complaints about difficulty surrounding the series’ last entry, everything has been made just a tad more accessible. Rather than beating a certain proportion of moves specified by your director, you’ll now have a simple, five strike system that stays constant from opening tyre screech to credits reel. Even the required performance level to complete all movies won’t result in too much forced repetition for most. At a stroke, this removes the game’s one key irritation, leaving players free to experiment with ways to improve their run – and trust us, they will. After all, when you’re four strikes down with 20 seconds of a rooftop run remaining, the level of nervous tension builds up just as it might if you were strapping up to perform such moves for real.

Simply put, every part of the game is perfectly teed up for newcomers and veterans alike to dip in and out of at their convenience. The handling, both on motorbikes and using four wheels, is forgiving to the point of intuition; each set-up never intrudes upon your time beyond a couple of minutes; there are many multiple routes open for obsessives to brag over and, above all this, multiplayer matches are about as relative to the main challenge as it’s possible for a videogame to be. Here, any degree of prescripting is ditched in favour of (relatively) regular racing; the result calculated based upon stunt points accumulated rather than position. Here, as ever, smashing through the hydraulic scenery (which, incidentally, varies from lap to lap) remains about as satisfying as ripping the seal from a new bottle of milk. Yes, it’s that good.

Though the removal of stunt quotas was necessary and beneficial, there are a few less-than-stellar features spoiling the party. While some are conceptual (it’s always difficult trying to perform a stunt at the first attempt, due to plain unfamiliarity and a very occasionally confusing set of on-screen directions), some are more substantial. Attached to the stunt-park editing mode is a set of challenges during which you must construct your route before riding it. With several prescribed stunts dotted around, this becomes more of a chore than it would be if you were simply handed items and challenged to attain high scores. On the whole, a rather insignificant fly perched atop a soup of thorough entertainment.

Dave Shaw