The Race and Street courses slowly move more toward urban environments. These are more rigid in basic design, but afford more interesting shortcuts; stuff like parking garages and hidden tunnels, while the vehicles are less junkyard monstrosities and more suped-up, pimped-out rides. More time with these modes will likely yield more interesting impressions, but if nothing else we came away with the distinct feeling that each class is set up for a different feel to the races, and the side events were nicely keyed up to the different kinds of vehicles (though they all had a basic demolition feel to things).

The races themselves are fairly similar to the last game, but there's an injection of something that can only be described as Burnout-itis. It's not a bad thing, but the influence of Criterion's racer can be felt. That doesn't mean the game has shifted to being about takedowns or anything like that (though one could argue that it was already there in the first game), you're just graded on how hard you hit the other guy, and given boost for it. Luckily, you're also given boost for just driving through objects too; roadside stands, fences, lampposts, and the like all offer small bits of boost.

The result is races that encourage a bit of friendly bump and grind, and in fact you're rewarded at the end of the race for it. A running tally of how hard you hit enemies (ranked and rewarded in increasing amounts from Slam to Power Hit to Blast Out to Wrecked) gives you credits, but you're also rewarded for hitting the most objects in the world, the most drivers, the fastest lap, and knocking the most drivers out of their cars with hard hits. The credits earned here can be used to buy cars or upgrade the ones you have.

Ah, but what of those mini-games? That's half the game, after all -- or at least it is now. Bugbear added plenty of variety to things, allowing you to bowl with your driver as the ball, skip him like a stone across water, play a game of poker (yes, really), play basketball, throw darts, and plenty more. Things here are a little more complex than last time too. The ramp to launch the driver is often longer, and littered with objects to either blow through (thus slowing you down), and tapping R1 will allow you to nudge the in-flight driver once per race. The competition is also fiercer. Though you'll really only run into this while in Career Mode, and you're allowed to freely practice with all the events from the main menu, it's still going to take a few tries to get things down.

Across all modes, one thing is quite clear: Bugbear knows the PS2 hardware. It's one thing to make a racer that offers a nice framerate with plenty of cars on the screen at the same time, but it's quite another to offer tons of stuff to slam into that subtly affects the way a car drives (no magical Stuntman wooden boxes that can flip a couple-ton muscle car), plus leaving all that stuff on the track fro the whole race, and then including cars that have more deformation and parts that break off than any racer we've see on the system -- and yes, that does indeed include Burnout.

Though we'll have to see how much of the Career Mode keeps us interested, and we weren't able to get an online game going yet, it's obvious that even now FlatOut 2 is in every way a better racer than its predecessor, and in many ways better than most racers on consoles. We'll have a full review when the game hits next month.