When James and I published our impressions of anime racer Screamer the other week, I mentioned I was keen to give its online races a go once it’d pulled out of the garage. Would the sights and sounds of sliding around its twisty tracks and slamming into real people make for as much fun as I’d had racing the computer in its story mode?

Well, I can now confirm those sounds are as follows:

• LIKE A SHOOTING STAR, BURN
• BRROOM
• NYOOM
• WOOF
• UH OH
• BONK
• DIEEEEE
• BURNNNNN
• AH NEED MY SHIE-
• BOOOOMMMM
• UGGHHHH
• AH, NOW I’M WAY DOWN
• BARK
• GOTC-
• BAABBBOOOMMM

The order in which those weaponised car noises and assorted character/in real life yellings occur varies. Sometimes ten of them are emitted at once, drowning your ears in a din of destructive dissonance. All of them are sounds I was familiar with from my run through Screamer’s single player tournament, but the sheer frequency with which I’ve heard them in three hours worth of online races is something else. Adding the capricious whims of fellow humans to the mix in any racing game’s usually a recipe for extra carnage, but Milestone’s latest racer takes extra steps to ensure that’s the case.

As of writing, the only online races on offer in Screamer are standalone ones with grids typically 15 or 16 cars large in total, up to ten of which can be real people. The same bots you’ll find in the 12 or so car single player races fill up the rest of the spots as needed. As in single player, some races are free-for-alls, while others put you into a team of two or three who’ve got to earn the most points by finishing as high as possible and amassing takedowns of opponents. In practice, I’ve found both formats quickly devolve into a frenzied fight to avoid being boomed into oblivion every three turns, or bumped into the walls at an angle so awkward it leaves you pointing the wrong way.

Sure, those things can happen to you in single player races, but unless the game’s in one of its particularly unforgiving moods, they’re usually not too hard to avoid. Racing against the AI alone, the action’s still bombastic, but its chaos feels fairly controlled. Screamer has to give you space to tick off your objectives before the chequered flag, so it largely leaves you to be the main instigator, especially when it comes to strikes that lead to respawns. Online, where five lap marathons await – a lot of the main story races are closer to three – everyone’s out for mayhem.

The AI drivers, as if already twisted by the bad influence of multiple humans, feel more openly bloodthirsty and willing to throw caution to the wind. Even the wall collision physics, momentum-sapping in single player, seem to have taken on a new energy that can spin you fully or catapult you upside down. The single player races are unforgiving, but all it took for me to beat them was a bit of perseverance. Usually no more than a few re-tries. Right now, I’ve got a single online win to my name after three hours of trying. I’ll be honest, I think it might have been a fluke, or at the very least a case of picture perfect car choice for the track.

The majority of my online races so far have ended with me stumbling across the line mid-pack, having been mired in Chuckle Brothers-esque ‘you explode me, I explode you, both of us lose time’ purgatory with three or four other cars for the whole run, while one or two others streak off to insurmountable leads. A few have gone so explosively that I’ve ended up floundering home in dead last. Aside from my fingers being a bit too slow to the shield button on a fair few occasions, I think this is down to trigger discipline being a foreign concept when you get into the heat of online battle.

Frontrunners might be able to save up their boost or leave strikes in the chamber for a chance to deploy the game’s overdrive mode, a longer period of power-up which combines extra speed with exploding ability. I’ve found those fighting for their lives tend to use whatever they’ve got as soon as it’s available, needing every advantage they can muster either to respond to a foe, or claw their way out of that foe’s orbit. If you get boomed, you tend to just slip down into another battle, in which someone else has often just earned the energy for a strike and oh bollocks, they’re firing it, I need to use the last of my boost to get away. Maybe that’s just down to my own impatience, as I feel the heat more keenly than someone whose exclusively races online might.

Perhaps the fact I’m driving around as a dog in sunglasses doesn’t help. While I’ve hopped into the shoes of a variety of Screamer’s cast – my one win came behind the wheel of former Yakuza member Noboru’s Japanese drifter – I keep settling on Fermi. This might be because he’s unlocked by completing the main story, and I’m subconsciously desperate to show all of my foes that I’ve beaten it. It might be, as I’ve already alluded to, because he’s a dog in sunglasses who can drive a racing car. The reason I keep telling myself, however, is that Fermi’s special ability gives him more powerful individual boosts and strikes, at the cost of not being able to enter overdrive mode. I’m sure if you put a real life dog behind the wheel of a souped up hatchback, they’d exhibit the same traits.

Anyway, since so many of my online races devolve into back-and-forth flurries of lesser attacks, I’ve convinced myself that Fermi’s talents make him the best bet for long-term success. At the very least, I’m keen to stand out from the crowd of online players, who naturally seem to trend towards Screamer main character Hiroshi Jackson, one of the first racers you unlock. I’ll probably turn out to be barking up the wrong tree and permanently switch to one of the established powerhouses like Jackson, Noboru or Ritsuko down the line, but for now I’m committed to riding out this ruff patch.