FlatOut: Ultimate Carnage is, without a doubt, the most destructive, most infuriatingly fun game you'll play on your Xbox 360. That's a pretty bold statement right there, but I'm confident that you'll feel the same way after blasting around the carnage fuelled streets of FlatOut.

You see, this incarnation of the game features a dizzying amount of features to ensure that those immense crashes are of the most spectacular kind. How about 8000 individual breakable objects in each level? Mix it up with a bit of highly explosive N2O, or Nitrous Oxide, and you've got some absolutely crazy, mind-blowingly spectacular crashes. Seriously, the moment you ram your opponent into the nearest wall you'll find yourself shielding yourself from the almost impossible number of objects that fly out in every direction from the surrounding environment and from your opponent's mashed up car.

As you can probably already tell, FlatOut has many similarities with the awesome Burnout series - the basic premise is the same, but the biggest problem with Burnout is that you constantly race around similar looking environments and the only thing that really changes is the look of the cars, and their speeds become almost silly. However, for those bad points, it had some utterly jaw-dropping crashes. This is where FlatOut excels; there are three classes of car - derby, street, and race. The names are self-explanatory, but in a nutshell, you start off with the rust-ridden bangers in Derby mode, working your way up to the gleaming speed-demons that are the Race class cars. Each class is implemented well too, as you'd expect; the Derby cars are terrible, slow, sluggish, but perfectly formed for those immense incidents involving your front bumper, the other guys' driver door and something solid, preferably fixed to the ground... like a brick wall.

Once you've saved up some credits, you can move into the next class, where you take control of faster, sharper handling vehicles. It's at this point that FlatOut really gets interesting. Better handling cars mean that you can guide your car into the poor guy in front of you with pinpoint accuracy. Think of yourself as a two tonne cruise missile with the cold hard power of nitrous rushing through your veins, and you quickly realise what this game is capable of.

Another feature this game has over Burnout is that you can actually modify and tune up your cars - not to the extent that the likes of Gran Turismo and Forza Motorsport, but you can bolt on added beats to get that little bit of extra speed and agility out of your vehicle. Thankfully, the options available when it comes to modifications aren't as in depth and complex as the likes of Forza, but let's face it, you've really got to be a car nut to understand what half of the features in Forza actually do! It's nice to be able to have a set of options that you can immediately understand, and if not, FlatOut also includes a miniature description for those who aren't car savvy. This is also backed up by a number of bars along the screen that show your car's basic attributes, such as acceleration, speed, weight and power. Whenever you move your cursor over a new modification, the bars change to show what impact it'll have on your cars attributes once it's installed. It's a nice touch, easy to understand and won't require you to go out and buy a Haynes manual to understand what exactly it does!

It's worth noting at this point that FlatOut isn't purely a racing game. Oh no, it's much more than that. Whilst the majority of events within the game are racing related, you also get to take part in my personal favourites, the destruction derby. As you can imagine, it's a large environment filled with destructible objects and about eleven of your rivals, all with the same aim in mind - to be the last car standing whilst mashing the other cars like Smash. Oh, and that's not even the half of it, as the game also features a 'Carnage' mode, where you get to take part in some of the most ridiculously fun levels I've ever seen in a game. Highlights include driving as fast as possible up to a ramp, then launching your driver out of the windscreen and guiding him to a safety net whilst trying to get as high as possible, or driving your car down a ramp and then launching your already bruised and battered driver into a set of bowling pins. It's incredibly funny and infuriatingly satisfying, largely due to the inclusion of an incredibly good rag-doll physics engine.

And that's one of the greatest things about Ultimate Carnage - the immensely powerful physics engine. It's just crazy to think that even with some of the most spectacular crashes this side of a Formula One race on a soaking wet track, the game runs as smoothly as it does. You get what looks like at least a hundred objects on the track immediately visible, along with some crazy crash action, and the game still manages to run as smooth as silk. It also incorporates impressive rag-doll physics for those awesome times when you hit something hard enough to launch your driver through the windscreen. Imagine throwing a doll filled with the stuff in beanbags against a wall and you'll see the effect that you get in this game when your driver is unfortunate enough to be launched from the comfy confines of the car.

Even more spectacular however are the gorgeous graphics and amazing environments you encounter in the game. You'll find yourself racing through some quite varied environments; you could be racing through a series of canals and around a suburban residential area one minute, then you're speeding around muddy tracks and through large puddles the next, in an area populated by caravans and banged out cars. You could even call it 'pikey' country for want of a better description! The graphics really are spectacular and each level is usually quite open, meaning that you've got a bit more room to perform that crazy crash, but each level is also nicely populated with many destructible objects and plenty of foliage. After going around a lap of any level, you'll appreciate how much of it can be destroyed and ripped apart. My only complaint in the graphics department is that some of the textures in the game don't look that great, and although these are few in number, they are still there to distract from the otherwise visual bliss that is Ultimate Carnage.

The in-game sound is pretty decent too; the cars have a meaty roar that's great when you've got a hefty subwoofer located in the room. Crashes sound realistic and the crunching of metal upon metal dounds awesome. The music is pretty good too - I found it to be fitting with the game's theme but some friends of mine didn't really like it, so I guess it's like Marmite - you either like it or you don't. Cranking up the volume is the only way to play this game though, as you really want to be able to hear all the crashes going on around you, so turn it up and enjoy!

Ultimate Carnage also features Xbox Live online play that's well incorporated with many of the standard features present in a lot of racing games; you can choose to race a random quick match or you can customise the type of game you're looking for, perfect for those days when all you want is to cause some absolute mayhem and destruction. Racing online against real people is in another league compared to competing against the computer. There's nothing quite like mixing it up with a couple of folks from around the world. The real fun comes when someone starts trash talking down the microphone, only for you to hand their proverbial backside to them in the form of blowing their car up completely! It's great fun online, more so than offline single player mode, and that's a really good thing for this kind of game, extending its longevity no end.

Now, I feel it is my duty to inform anyone who's reading this to one major problem. This game is as infuriating as hell! Honestly, it's as if the developers, Bugbear Entertainment, enjoy the fact that this game will cause you to throw your controller at the TV in a fit of rage, so much so that they've even included an achievement that you can only get after you've reset the races you're losing in a certain number of times. It's almost as if they want you to shatter your precious TV screen by throwing your controller at it! You'll quickly feel my pain here if you've been tearing up the streets in Ultimate Carnage, as seemingly random things in the road cause your car to do some silly things. Crashing into large objects is unavoidable at the best of times, but it's made a million times more frustrating when crashing into that item causes your car to slow right down, and you quickly get overtaken by numerous opponents, pushing you back down the grid and struggling to catch up.

This brings me nicely onto the next thing I hated about FlatOut. You always start at the very back of the grid, and from the get go the cars at the very front seem as though they instantly zip up to warp speed, whilst the cars towards the back of the grid, including you, seem to travel slower than my granny does down the high street on a Saturday afternoon. This causes the races to go one of two ways; one is that you floor the accelerator like a getaway driver all the way through the race in the aim of just trying to catch up and get a respectable podium position, or two, you spend the entire race being smashed around by the computer controlled drivers whilst trying to cause some absolute mayhem on the road.

These fairly significant problems are overshadowed by the mother of all problems though; other cars can become stuck to yours. I don't think I've ever yelled so much at the TV (except for the times when Simon Cowell appears on screen) as I have when I'm attempting to push the car in front into a spin by nudging at its back wheels. In most games it causes the car to spin around and slide around you, but in FlatOut, it slides just enough for it to be horizontal across your bonnet, and whilst it's there, it seems to cling on for dear life as it takes ramming into a solid piece of the environment to get it off. This is made more frustrating by the fact that it slows your car down to a snail's pace, and by the time you've got it off, you end up being six places down the grid. Seriously, it's a major problem I found, especially more so that the game encourages you to cause as much mayhem as you possibly can.

Even with these problems in mind, I still feel that FlatOut excels over the insane fun that is Burnout - and that's not an easy thing to do. The car classes are varied and well implemented, each with its own technique required to keep on the road (or off the road and wrapped around another car, if that's your style). And as I've already mentioned, FlatOut features some of the most spectacular crashes you'll ever see on your 360. Each one is a work of art in itself and it becomes more and more fun to try and mash your opponents into new objects to try and take them out in the most ridiculous way possible. Thankfully, it's also the sort of game you can pick up and play immediately; there's no complex learning curve like you find in other racing games such as Forza, it's just good clean metal-mashing fun. It'll also last you quite a while too, as there's so much to do in the game it's crazy - once you finally get through with the Career mode, you can move onto the Carnage mode do perform stunts and take part in the demolition derbies. It'll also take you a good while to get through the game, as you'll be constantly resetting the race after being flipped around by an opponent and ending up in twelfth place quicker than you can say "Lamborghini". Online play is a must too - it's just so much fun, so get a few of your buddies together and revel in the utter carnage you'll inflict upon them.

I wholeheartedly recommend FlatOut: Ultimate Carnage. It's seriously good fun, and whilst it may be very aggravating at times, it'll have you coming back for more until your thumbsticks are worn down to tiny stumps.

Reviewed by Harmz Singh for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).