Street races in GTA have always kind of been a love-it-or-hate-it thing, with players either embracing the high speeds and hair-pin turns, or suffering through them in the hope that the next mission will take them back to the carnage. GTA Races, meanwhile, strive to please both camps by offering them a chance to either race to victory in a high-performance vehicle, or just get out of the car and completely wreck things for everyone.

The actual races are simple point-to-point circuits - standard fare for a GTA game - and the hosting player will be able to set a vehicle class at the beginning of the match, which can include high-performance cars, motorcycles, boats or helicopters. We say "starting" because it's entirely likely you won't hold onto it for long - the streets are littered with weaponry that can be fired from a moving vehicle, and although the races are technically limited to a narrow circuit, you're free to wander off and explore the rest of the city - and bring back any large, street-blocking vehicles you might find there. Hey, if you can't win the race, you might as well have some fun trying to stop everyone else from winning, right?

Chris: A lot of people bitch about the racing in GTA, but I’ve always loved it, especially when you’re not confined to a single car. To be honest, I can’t figure out why GTA Race worked for me, but it did. We start up, and I’m holding my own in the top three pole positions. But in a split second, everything descended into to complete anarchy; the player in the top position got out of his Super GT, jumped in a bus and parked it directly in front of a small archway, blocking everybody from passing through.

If that weren’t enough, the jerk starts lobbing grenades as the entrants begin to crash into his makeshift barricade. What a dick! Or maybe not... anybody who wasn’t vaporized in the explosions was forced out of their vehicles and into the streets to find a weapon, thus changing the dynamic of the entire race.
 
After justice was served, everybody turned on everyone else. You see someone going for the car you want? Kill him. Shoot his tires out, force him off the road and remember: you can now aim as you're driving. The goal isn’t so much to win the race, but instead to keep anyone else from winning the race. Man, that sounds mean-spirited, but damned if it isn’t fun.

Moving on from Middle Park, we hit the Liberty City Airport on motorcycles. This race was massive, spanning almost the entire airport. And since it became clear that it’s more fun to get out to antagonize, this "race" turned into 20 minutes of giddy explosions. My bike didn’t very last long. It took mere minutes for some of the more seasoned Rockstar folks to knock me off and blow it up. Poor li'l me, I’m sprinting across the tarmac trying to find another ride while dodging gunfire and my murderous wheeled opponents. Luckily, the airport is littered with cars. Good ones, too.

It was glorious, life-affirming chaos, especially when four of us decided to gang up on one of the more dastardly drivers. We made roadblocks, pegged that poor deserving bastard with rocket launchers, drove in front of him while dropping grenades in his path and even forced him into the ocean.

Finally, we tried a helicopter race over Alderney. I’ve never been one for the helicopters. I tend to resort to them only for long distance travel, or to get to a better car. The control just as they always have - using throttle to rise, brake to fall and the shoulder buttons to turn in midair. There was a race going on, but I said nuts to that and decided to go exploring, in hopes of finding some goodies Rockstar didn’t want me to know about. Just as I was saying something along the idiotic lines of “Ooo, Is that a golf course? Will Niko play golf?” another helicopter swooped in behind me and cut off my tail with its propeller. Hello, gravity.

Mikel: Man, I didn't even get to go exploring in the helicopter race. I figured I'd have an easy time of it when I passed up the rotund news-chopper models for a sleek Annihilator gunship, but I ended up having a hard time just adjusting to the helicopter controls (which, to be fair, I've always sucked at). The floating, midair checkpoints weren't easy to hit, and when I resorted to trying to ruin everyone else's race, I found out the hard way that the Annihilator's machineguns can't be auto-aimed. It was then that I noticed I was floating above a nuclear reactor and - positioning myself above a steam tower - I decided to see just how detailed GTA IV really was. I plummeted down and landed inside, and - lo and behold - there was a fully rendered set of heat-dissipation coils at the bottom. Which promptly made me explode. That was kind of a wash.

The Middle Park and LC Airport races were a lot more fun, though, thanks in part to the fact that my rides ended up hideously trashed both times. In Middle Park, this meant that most of my time was spent wandering around on foot, taking potshots at racers and running down other car-less contestants with the jalopies that were parked by the side of the road. Pointless? Maybe. Enormously fun, definitely.

The airport race, meanwhile, turned into an epic dicking-around session, running over 20 minutes because half of the players have to actually finish the race before the match timer starts counting down. To start, I chose a Zombie - a full-sized, Harley-type bike - and after trading shots with my opponents for a couple laps, I was reduced to skidding around on its rear rim after the tire was shot off. I ditched it on the airstrip - which features giant 747s taxiing and taking off (although driving near their engines didn't hurl me into the air like I'd hoped) - and traded it for a junky sedan that was parked near the air-traffic-control tower. That almost immediately got blown up by a rocket launcher, and after I excitedly tried to race in a damn luggage loader, the "race" quickly devolved into an on-foot, free-for-all deathmatch.

Bare-handed, I picked a fight with a nearby player who'd respawned after losing his ride, and I emerged victorious with a bare-knuckle kill. And then another one. And another one after that, because the poor bastard kept respawning close to where he was killed, and I decided it would be fun to see how many times I could kill him empty-handed. The answer turned out to be "a lot." I heard later that the poor tester I had repeatedly smacked down was upset about the whole thing. So, sorry, tester - I didn't mean anything by it.

The whole thing was wildly stupid, but also wildly fun, especially once everyone started finding rocket launchers (which, by the way, don't even scratch the 747s despite exploding spectacularly against their hulls) and turned the tarmac into an explosive sniper's alley.

Matt: Absolutely loved this mode. Every race was frantic from start to finish - a lawless scramble for first place with player positions constantly switching throughout the duration. I don't know if it was just the excitement of being in a dark room with half-a-dozen other men all noisily committed to winning, but I don't think I've had this much fun with a combat racer since first playing Mario Kart on the SNES.

In one race, I was literally screaming fun out my mouth. I thought I'd nailed victory for sure, only for someone to shoot my tyres, leaving my Feltzer sports car driving on sparking rims. I spotted a parked Banshee and dove out the car. "If I'm quick," I thought, "I can still make second." Just as my driver's hand is about to open the Banshee's door - WHACK - someone rams the Banshee, sending it skidding up the road. As if that's not rude enough, the asshole driver who's foiled my hopes for silver drops a sneaky grenade out his window. Banshee go BOOM! My guy's left standing on the road like a wet wiener at a sausage festival and I watch as the rest of the pack speeds past. Laughter in the headset. Bastards. Defeated, I get back in the tyre-less Feltzer and limp over the finish line with all the style of an orthopaedic shoe.