Remember Circuit Breakers? Well Mashed plays very similarly to it, only now in a fully 3D world. The game works thus: Instead of the racing on a splitscreen setup where each player has their own screen for the action, you all share one view; an isometric top-down one. As one player drives ahead or lags behind, the camera zooms out to accommodate this. After a certain distance, the camera stops pulling out. At this point, if the player that is in first position goes near the edge of the screen, and the player behind is lagging near the other end of the screen, the player in the lead will win a point. The first to eight points wins the race.

There are various selectable options for setting up the multiplayer games, and one feature that you can turn on is a “revenge mode”; this means that when one player is knocked out of a race (only applies to 3 or more human/AI opponents), the losing player takes control of a helicopter and if they manage to lock-on a car with the target, they fire a missile at a car and blow them up! Obviously this is a lot of fun, as everyone playing can see the target on screen, and are trying to swerve around to evade the locking target. This often ends up in a crash with another player, or falling off the edge of a cliff or something. It’s a great way of keeping an eliminated player from sitting around doing nothing whilst everyone else continues in the game.

One very cool feature in the game is the pad sharing option that means if you want to play with 3 or 4 people, and you don’t have a multi-tap, two people can share one controller and play that way. This has been done in the past by another developer with their racing game (Codemasters and the legendary Micro Machines), and the idea works really well. You’ve got to be quite good friends with the person you’re playing with as you have to sit very close to each other, but as a work-around for the lack of controller ports on front of Playstation 2, it’s a great idea.

We really loved Mashed, and everyone we played it with felt the same way. It’s got no real world tracks, no fully-licensed cars with accurate damage models and super realistic handling - it’s an ultra-pure game in every respect, and for this very reason it’s absolutely brilliant. In a world where everyone is trying to make more and more realistic games, and sometimes missing out on the most important elements, this really is a breath of fresh, truly playable air. Anyone feeling racing games are a bit stale these days with the likes of Gran Turismo clone number 5, should not hesitate picking this up as soon as they can. Great fun.