Mashed: Drive to Survive (PlayStation 2)

Mashed is an action-packed top-down arcade-racer. On 13 tracks (which must be played free in single-player first) you need all your driving skills to survive and make it to the finish as the 1st with one of the four different cars available (from slow ones to really fast ones).

The heart of the single-player mode (besides the quick battle against the AI) are the bronze, silver and gold challenges for every track you need to complete to play free the next track. Each challenge is one of the seven (eight in multiplayer) game modes available. From normal race-events (just be the 1st) over battles where you need to kill all your enemies before they do to the ultimate survival mode where everyone doesn’t really like you.

To make things much easier there are nine different power-ups and weapons scattered on the tracks which you can pick up. From simple oil slicks over mines to deadly mortars there’s everything you need to kick the enemy drivers out of the race. Of course they can also choose from the equipment. As you can only survive a few hits you need to make sure they can’t use them on you. And to make it even worse there are many small passages (or the track is just one small passage…) with nothing on one or both sides of the track in which you or your enemy can fall very deep.

But the real heart of Mashed is the split-screen multiplayer mode which you can play with up to four players on one PC. If you don’t find four friends you can fill in the missing spots with bots or just leave them open. The additional eighth, multiplayer exclusive game mode is like CTF with cars. The goal is to hold the flag and drive as far away from the enemies as possible to get a point. To keep the race interesting for the players that are already out of it, they can use a helicopter which flies over the track to launch missile attacks on the cars still racing. So you can take your revenge before the race is even over and the racers have one more thing to worry about. But this feature can be deactivated when you setup the race.