Admit it… the best thing about Need for Speed: Payback was the slo-mo crash mechanic.
The racing itself was pretty meh.
Enter Danger Zone 2, which is being dubbed as the spiritual successor to Burnout.
Developed by Three Fields, DZ 2 is an expansion of Burnout’s crash mode rather than circuit racing proper.
The aim of the game?
Strategically wreck your car to cause as much traffic carnage as possible.
To help, once you’ve made the initial crash – time slows down and you’re able to trigger another explosion to chain destruction together.
There are eight vehicles to choose from, including a Sedentary Sedan, a Chaotic Coupe, a Really Crazy Taxi, a Euro Truck and a Formula One car.
Gone are the constrained environments of the first game, replaced with large, real-life location ranging from LAX to the M62 interchange in Leeds.
Not that crash mode is the only feature Danger Zone 2 has under its hood.
There’s a traffic checking mode, similar to Burnout Revenge – that puts you behind the wheels of a huge truck with the aim of smashing your way through as many cars as possible.
Elsewhere, there’s a handful of survival mode races where you need to keep your boost up by avoiding collisions.
Thankfully, DZ 2 looks the part – thanks to it being powered by Unreal 4.
As a result, you’ll be treated to a plethora of graphical quirks designed to make the game as pleasing on the eye as possible
Temporal anti-aliasing smooths edges while clever rendering of environmental objects frees up GPU grunt.
Then there’s the obligatory sparks, shards of metal and impressive fire effects, which look as good as you’d hope.
You won’t need a super-fast PC to reap all these visual benefits.
DZ 2 has been optimised for Xbox One X with native 4k and 1080p 60 fps, while the PS4 Pro receives temporal checkerboard rendering and 1080p 150% super sampling.
To keep things competitive, there are online leader boards – where you can pit yourself against friends.
I know what I’m doing this weekend.
Danger Zone 2 is out now on Xbox One, PS4 and PC via Steam.