The premise is simple enough: near-future television show broadcasts car races on tracks beset by obstacles triggered by pre-rigged explosives and activated by the race car drivers themselves.
You're talking bombs dropped from helicopters, construction/demolition equipment gone mad, cruise liners in dry dock toppled, entire buildings blown at the foundation just as a car goes by. Press a button to make it happen, awesomeness ensues.
Driving the cars is nearly effortless; gas, brake, steer. Tap the brake on a turn and you're into a controlled, four-wheel power slide, which these days is better known as "drifting." The more you play and win, the better the cars get; luscious rides that are better at drifting or better at taking damage, better at accelerating or better top speed and so on. But even from the start, when you're only given three such cars to choose from, they all handle like high performance scream machines.
Pull stunts like a decent drift or a nice bit of airtime off an impromptu jump, or simply draft the car in front for some environmentally friendly speed stealing, and you'll also charge up a power bar. Charge that up enough and you'll enable event triggers where an icon blinks suggestively atop the cars in front as they happen near a pre-rigged prop. You tap a button on-the-fly to detonate something down the way (or right beside you, if you're not careful), or cue a destructo event on someone in the lead. Time it right and it's all vroom, pow, crash-'em-up fantastica, all caught on camera from a few different angles for the pleasure of the viewing audience back home. Nobody dies, of course; they just auto-magically reset with a fresh car and get right back to it, a few seconds and some positioning lost but otherwise no worse for wear.
Some event triggers will open up temporary short cuts, as when a crane lifts a barrier or "accidentally" drops a ramp of some sort, so there is a bit of strategy in there. But it's mostly just straight up racing and blowing the crap out of stuff along the way. It's exactly like the Nintendo Wii's lovable cuddly-fluff race-o-rama known as Mario Kart - or maybe ExciteTruck - except with Jerry Bruckheimer's wanton destruction sensibilities.
A handful of alternate game types other than racing - time challenges, survival contests, etc. - are just variations on a theme for the sake of filler, but the basic theme is so engaging in the first place, you won't mind.
And, as mentioned, despite its E10+ rating with a "violence" warning, Split/Second is a pure delight for kids, kids and parents together especially, because it's easy as heck (on the "easy" difficulty setting, of course; pretty darn challenging on "normal" or hard"), and cathartically goofy as all get out, surreal and nonsensical and there it is, an engaging riot of o'er the top destruction and in-your-face racing, too.
And just when you think it'd get boring and tedious because there's not much more to it than that, it doesn't.
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