I've already waffled on about this nested elsewhere. Thought it deserved a highlight from me.

Having had my fingers burned by F1 2010, I thought I'd go arcade for my driving fix, remembered I hadn't really sealed Split/Second:Velocity yet. I've got this 80% rule, where once I really 80%, or what I perceive to be 80% of a game I tend to lose focus and "come back to it", I actually have come back to Split Second and the time away has helped.

Just to to recap... drive a car, stuff blows up. Stuff can blow up on command, by other people's command, sequenced or with helicopters.

There is the typical problem with games at the moment, and that is the difficulty arc is so amazingly shallow, you need to resign your job to actually commit the time to get anywhere interesting with it. Instead of 3 tracks then boom, getting your backside handed to you, its about 24 races before anything happens.

So there are a few variations of the core idea, Race vs 7 other cars, Time trial with stuff blowing up sequenced, Overtaking trucks whilst they spit barrels and deadly barrels at you, 2 helicopter modes, one where you avoid incoming missiles, another where you can retaliate, a mode where the last player gets blowed up after a countdown.

All of that wouldn't be worth anything if the core driving mechanics weren't interesting... each car gets stats, speed, drift, acceleration and strength. All upto 10 bars... and I've found out, they do go up to ten bars. But basically, the guts, the game, is the driving, and thats excellent, you can get as sticky or as drifty a car as you want. Its great fun.

It all hangs together with the tactics around the blowing stuff up. This works with the sort of doing stuff fills up meters, drifting, drafting, jumping, avoiding stuff. The meter is made up of three bars, 2 blue and the third red. Blue "power plays" are usually produce a shock wave or explosion that with tactical knowledge of the track can be useful, they can also open up tempory shortcuts. If you know the tracks though, the red, 3 bar "power plays" can completely change the track, and also blow up bigger things.

As far as I am concerned it has an incredibly well engineered series of tracks, probably too clever, as you can't really appreciate the spacial ingenuity going on to stick these tracks together, the difficulty arc is too shallow, but if you stick with it, it rewards you, the difficulty, once it happens is spot on. Sure, some of it is a bit random, in that acceptible Mario Kart way.

I can't beat the Time Trial highscores in the game, without some serious pad throwing concentration... that's pretty impressive for a game released in the 21st century.

I am officially heartily recommending this game, as probably the best example of this game type outside of Nintendo, whatever that means, its got tactics, speed, design and difficulty (eventually).

Not tried it online.