When you play a Beach Buggy game, you know you're going to be collecting a garage full of sweet rides. From the Lightning muscle car to the Beach Buggy to the monster Rock Stomper, each car is tuned to have its own unique personality, and each comes with a carefully balanced set of strengths and trade-offs.

In Beach Buggy Racing 2, we've lovingly remastered all the fan-favorite cars from the first game, and added two brand new cars. There's a new paint and decal system, and a brand new system of car "mods" that we're really excited about.

So first, let's talk about the cars.

The Sarge (pictured up at the top of the article) is a spunky off-road vehicle that handles sort of like a mini version of the Monster Truck. It's perfectly suited for crashing through obstacles and fording jungle streams, but still boasts some sporty handling.

Our other newcomer is the Grand Prix. It's essentially our version of an open-suspension Formula car, sleek, stripped, and built for speed. As you might expect, the Grand Prix is blisteringly fast -- at least on flat ground like city streets. But its lighter weight means it gets pushed around more by impacts and explosions.

CAR MODS

A big new feature in BBR2 is the concept of car mods. Mods are variations of a car model that you can use to further change the way a car looks. A car mod performs the same as the base model, but it looks different -- sometimes really different.

As you can see, the Stock mod of the Lightning looks about like you'd expect, but there are other mods you can unlock as well -- the Juiced and Wasteland mods for example. You can customize each mod separately with paints and decals to really make every car in your collection stand out and feel different.

OOOhh, Shiny!

Speaking of paints, here's a peak at the new paint shop. As in the previous BBR, you can customize each car's paint and decals, but in BBR2 we've added a ton of variety and options.

There are a ton of new decals available, and paint color types have been expanded. We now have extra-fancy chameleon and rainbow paints in a variety of colors. There are even matte colors for that cool no-shine finish.

With all these new paint options and the ability to unlock over 40 different mods in the game, BBR2 will keep you busy happily collecting and customizing your garage for a really long time. (And that's just the stuff we're going to have available on Day 1!)

For my next blog piece I'll answer a question a lot of fans have been asking:

"Who's that guy with the spiked helmet??"