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 h🐷ill 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 h🧸old the button, the steeper the angle of flight.)

The events themselves are all pretty entertain🗹ing (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 certainᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ𒀱ᩚᩚᩚ area on the ground while dodging giant catcher's mitts.

꧃As you might imagine, allꦦ 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.

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.