Just three hours into the Eurogamer Expo and things are already looking awesome with a capital-friggin-A. We’ve all just come out of a developer session with Blackrock Studios, the team behind upcoming racer Split/Second. We were treated to an exclusive look at a new track in the game and given a little behind-the-scenes tour of how the game was put together.

Read some more over the jump!

According to Nick Baynes, game director at Blackrock, a lot of racing games are missing the variety you can get with a changing environment. Split/Second looks set to change all that with its dynamic, player-controlled environment alterations – ie: you get to blow a heap of shit up and this changes how you race. You play a driver in a reality TV series whose entertainment involves racing around movie-style sets and destroying opponents with the environment. Dancing With The Stars this ain’t.

Driving like a madman in one of Split/Second’s hyper-aggressive-looking muscle cars — jumping, drifting, ramming everyone else — builds up a 3-tier Power bar shown floating beside your car on the game’s HUD, which is all centred around your vehicle so you can see all of the chaos unfold without any screen furniture getting in the way. Using one of three buttons on your controller triggers a “Power Play” — or in layman’s terms, something cool happens — which changes the track  in some way to your advantage,

You can build up a little power and open up something as simple as a shortcut, or build all of your power up and unleash a massive level 3 Power Play to utterly obliterate your opponents and alter the track in as dramatic a fashion as you can possibly imagine.

In the docklands track we were shown (a new environment to go with the airport we’ve already seen in trailers) level one Power Plays would activate massive cranes which would hoist obstructive crates out of the way letting you cut a corner and shave a second or so off of your laptime. A level three Power Play would just wipe those cranes out altogether.

Fantastically, most of these came about because the design team essentially thought “wouldn’t it be cool if this happened?” and the scenario was storyboarded before it was realised by the animation team and brought to awesome life. As if that wasn’t enough, the link with Disney (who’re publishing it) meant that the design team got a sit-down with the Imagineers who design the rollercoasters for the theme parks, so they could make the tracks themselves feel as intense as Space Mountain.

My favourite bit, by far, was a lighthouse that I had assumed was just some background clutter. I had to stop myself from laughing hysterically as said lighthouse then detonated itself and collapsed all over an opponent a hundred feet or so in front. That said, our car was perfectly safe — Split/Second won’t activate a Power Play if you’re too close to the possible aftermath.

What’s more, multiplayer won’t skip a beat and all of the Power Plays will work just as well against real people as they will against AI opponents. In case you haven’t guessed it by now, I think we’re onto a winner here.

Split/Second is out next year on PS3 and 360, but for now I’m gonna go play it for myself and I might even let you know what I think. But you can probably guess what I’m going to say already.

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