It's rare that you can summarize the entire thrust of a modern video game in a single sentence. Usually words like "interactive" and "emergent" get thrown in, and the whole sentence ends up collapsing under its own weight. Not so with Crash 'n' Burn, another in Eidos' surprisingly online-heavy E3 lineup. Here's the complete description of Crash 'n' Burn, straight from the developer: "Customize and create your own vehicles, then race them in a variety of demolition-type games." Wow, that's easy to understand. We've played Atari 2600 games with more complicated plots, in fact.

Crash 'n' Burn is divided into two distinct areas: car creation, and arcade-style racing. On the creation end, you start out by choosing one basic vehicle structure (sedan, pickup, and so on), then tacking on components, decals, rims, paint, and words written in Gothic fonts across the windshield. Nothing here is licensed, and the driving model isn't meant to be slavishly realistic anyway, so your imagination's the limit during this phase. Ever want to make your own ricemobile but didn't have the $30,000 required? Just take Crash 'n' Burn's Honda Accord-ish car model, add a dozen stickers, some racing stripes, and a spoiler about twice as big as you'd ever need, and Bob's your uncle.

Once you've got the car of your, erm, dreams, it's time to take it out on the track. Racing in Crash 'n' Burn works the same online and off -- no matter what type of race you prefer, you'll receive experience points that let you unlock new modes, components, vehicle types, and so forth (over 300 in all). Of course, these aren't your typical races at all. We got to play a "kamikaze" race with 16 cars on the track at once (every race has 16 cars, with computer vehicles filling out the pack if there aren't enough human players). The twist: half of the pack runs the course clockwise, and the other half runs in the opposite direction, similar to a mode in Atari's Test Drive: Eve of Destruction.

This leads to rather predictable results in short order. Car crashes are fairly cartoony, with autos flying into the air and then flipping back onto their wheels as if nothing happened, but the damage they take -- rumpled front ends, shattered glass, scorched paint jobs -- is remarkable in its loving detail. As time goes on and the human racers realized that they all have nitro boosts, the carnage became more serious. Every car has an energy meter of sorts, and when it's out, you're out -- your car falls apart and you're out of the race. This doesn't mean that you disappear from the track, though. Every bit of car-crash debris, from car parts and glass to oil slicks and gasoline fires, stays on the race course until the checkered flag drops. This makes for some extremely harrowing final laps, if you're lucky enough to survive until then -- not only do you have to outrun your competitors, but you have to do so while dodging wrecked autos and oil patches that completely rob your tires of any traction whatsoever. As an arcade experience, this demo was pretty intense -- while it doesn't match Burnout 3's adrenaline level, it seems to be worth a good trip or two for its 16-player online matches.

Available for the PlayStation 2 and Xbox this fall.

Copyright © 2004 Ziff Davis Media Inc. All Rights Reserved. Originally appearing in 1UP.