FlatOut, from developer Bugbear and published by Vivendi Universal and Empire Interactive, is a demolition derby-inspired racer where the main attraction is to wreck your car in some hot vehicle-on-vehicle action. FlatOut puts a cherry on top of the carnage by ejecting the driver through the windshield during particularly hard crashes. Underneath the gimmicks, however, is an average racing game that doesn’t have much to offer aside from a few quick thrills when you first pop it in.
Features
FlatOut features 16 cars and 36 tracks on which you can whet your appetite for destruction. The tracks you get to race on range from paved, purpose-built race tracks to dirt tracks to snow covered roads and there is also, of course, demo derby arenas and figure eight tracks. The cars you get to destroy are typical demo derby cars that could be plucked from any redneck’s backyard. The feature list is pretty straightforward and includes quick races, a career mode, time trials, multiplayer, and online races. The nice thing about FlatOut is that it isn’t just a demo derby game. There is also straightforward racing included as well which helps keep things interesting. Even better is that there are a number of minigames that make use of the driver ejection gimmick. You’ll get to see how high, how far, and how accurately you can toss your driver in games such as bowling and darts. As you can probably guess, the bonus games are arguably the best part of the whole package.Career Mode
Gameplay
FlatOut is definitely a full-featured racing game, but where it fails is not in the amount of stuff that was packed into but rather the fact that the gameplay itself isn’t all that good. The biggest problem is that there is no sense of speed whatsoever and the cars feel like you are driving around on ice which is never a good thing. The handling isn’t bad, but it just seems goofy that you can slide your car at a 90 degree angle pretty much at will. Basically, your car doesn’t feel like it is attached to the road and it is a very hard feeling to shake if you are used to Forza or Burnout 3 or pretty much any other Xbox racing game. Another issue is that the AI is extremely aggressive and can and will wreck you in order to get by, which is frustrating. I’m also not a fan of the fact that you have to run into other cars/objects in order to earn nitrous. You absolutely have to have a steady supply of nitrous in order to win a race, but you have to destroy your car in order to actually get nitrous. That seems pretty stupid. Also, the driver ejection gimmick gets old about the third time you see it which is a very bad thing considering that it is the main attraction in FlatOut.Continued on Page 2 ...
