FlatOut 2 hands-on

The new game features 12 such stunt events, which usually break down like this: You'll pick a special stunt car, roar down a hill or across an obstacle-laden path, and hold down a button to launch your driver out the windshield at whatever target you're supposed to hit. (The longer you hold the button, the steeper the angle of flight.)

The events themselves are all pretty entertaining (to watch, at least), but we found that the simple, stupid-fun ones - like the High Jump, in which you try to launch your driver into a tall net, or the minigame where you have to guide your hapless future corpse through a series of flaming rings - were the most enjoyable.

We could have done without the more complicated ones, though, such as the one where you have to launch your driver into a giant baseball bat, and then try to make him fall in a certain area on the ground while dodging giant catcher's mitts.

As you might imagine, all of this is a lot more fun when more than one person is involved and you can compete to do stupid things like launch yourself into a completely different stunt, or try to run yourself over with your own car.

Mikel Reparaz
After graduating from college in 2000 with a BA in journalism, I worked for five years as a copy editor, page designer and videogame-review columnist at a couple of mid-sized newspapers you've never heard of. My column eventually got me a freelancing gig with GMR magazine, which folded a few months later. I was hired on full-time by GamesRadar in late 2005, and have since been paid actual money to write silly articles about lovable blobs.