Destruction Derby 2

Destruction Derby 2 arrived in 1996 as Psygnosis's follow-up to the previous year's demolition-racing hit, and it doubled down on the one thing that made the original stand out: cars that crumple, buckle and eventually die. Where most racers treated your vehicle as an indestructible avatar, here the metal deforms visibly as you trade paint, panels fly off, and a badly mangled engine will start smoking and finally give out mid-race. That commitment to damage was the whole point, and it still feels satisfying in a way few modern racers bother to replicate.

The game splits its appeal between two modes. Circuit racing rewards clean-but-aggressive driving, while the Wreckin' Racing and the dedicated demolition bowls encourage you to abandon the finish line entirely and simply ram everyone into scrap for points. The 'Total Destruction' arena, where the last car running wins, is the purest expression of the concept and where the game is at its most gleeful. Points scored for spins and wrecks feed into a championship structure that gives the carnage some purpose.

Technically it was a step up from the first game, with chunkier cars and better tracks, and the PC version benefited from higher resolutions if your hardware could manage it. It isn't a serious driving sim and never pretended to be — the handling is loose and arcadey, tuned entirely around collisions rather than racing lines. Played today it holds up as a great short-session party game, best enjoyed in multiplayer where the schadenfreude of wrecking a friend's car with two laps to go never really gets old.