FLATOUT

GAME DETAILS :-

Developer : Bugbear Entertainment

Publisher : Empire Interactive , Konami And Valve Corporation

Engine : Diesel Engine

Genre : Demolition Derby

Release Date : July 12 , 2005

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS :-

Operating System : Windows 98 / Windows 2000

CPU : AMD Athlon 2800+ / Intel Pentium 4 Processor

Memory (RAM) : 256 MB

Graphics Hardware : DirectX 9.0c Compatible Video Card with Memory 64 MB

[NVIDIA : GeForce FX 5200 Series
ATI : Radeon X850 Series]

Hard Disk Space : 1.1 GB

GAME FEATURES :-

FlatOut is destruction racing to the very core, throwing aside any superfluous story elements or anything similarly goofy for the sake of just making a pure arcade racer. When you first boot up the game, you're offered a career mode, a quick race, a time trial mode, and multiplayer. Career is where you'll spend much of your offline time and where you'll buy your first car. Initially, you're presented with a few decidedly slower vehicles, but as you move through the career mode, new classes will unlock and each one will get progressively faster. Plus, you can buy tune-ups for each ride that improve speed, horsepower, traction, braking, and all the other usual upgradable stats you'd find in a racing game. The career mode is really just a long series of races within different circuits: bronze, silver, and gold. You don't even necessarily have to win each and every race to unlock the next circuit, but you do have to place at least third in all of them to make sure you earn a medal. Placing higher will earn you more cash, which you can subsequently use to buy more tune-ups and cars, but you can usually earn enough money just by earning a medal. While this way of doing things does shorten the experience a bit , there are nearly 40 races in all, so there's always the bonus races to keep you busy. The bonus races are effectively a collection of straight-up destruction derbies, races on tracks that seem specifically geared toward maximum destruction , and a bunch of minigames that make specific use of FlatOut's biggest gimmick: the ability to launch the driver of your car out of the front windshield. This acts as a sort of pseudo punishment in normal races when you wreck too hard , but in the minigames, you're presented with either a gigantic dart board, a high-jump meter, a set of bowling pins, or something along those lines, and a track with which to drive your car up. The actual driving mechanics of FlatOut aren't terribly complex or deep, and they rely pretty heavily on lots of powersliding and crazy smashups for entertainment value, rather than on any real racing strategy to speak of. Fortunately, it works...at least, it works well enough. The faster cars in the game can get up to some pretty crazy speeds, and the handling of the cars, though very loose, is pretty manageable once you get used to it. The whole thing of launching your driver out of the car does get old, as we've said previously, but it only happens during the most brutal wrecks.

FlatOut's racing model awards you a degree of boost for smashing up the scenery and your opponents. It might seem somewhat counterintuitive to be rewarded for breaking your car, but only the most severe wrecks really incapacitate you, and frankly, considering how great the wrecks in this game look, it's hard to not want to do it. Cars deform to a spectacular degree, bodies scrunch up bit by bit with each progressive wreck, bumpers sheer off, and sparks fly every which way. Tracks are similarly destructible. You can smash through big wooden signs, send stacks of tires and nearby barriers flying, and leave big chunks of the scenery all over the track to become dangerous obstacles for the next lap. Actually, if there's any one complaint to be lobbied at the level destructibility, it's that some of the debris can be pretty easily driven over the next time around with little consequence. Most often it will be the smaller stuff that you can drive over, but you will encounter some sizable pieces of junk that you'll definitely want to avoid. Since FlatOut was developed in Europe, it's not altogether surprising that the soundtrack comes from a lot of artists that North American players might not have ever heard of. What is kind of odd is that all the bands that have been culled together for this game all sound like they're trying to do their best impersonation of generic American alternative rock. A few of the tunes are legitimately catchy, but for the most part, they just kind of fade into the background as you play. On top of everything else, the lack of custom-soundtrack support on the Xbox or PC is pretty annoying. The rest of the sound effects are all quite good, though not any better than most other competent racers on the market. FlatOut would be a whole lot easier to recommend if certain aspects of its package were tightened up. The merely mediocre artificial intelligence, the weirdly sporadic multiplayer features across platforms, and the repetitive driver-launching mechanic are probably going to annoy the hell out of some people. But if you can look past some of these flaws, the game's delightfully unscripted core racing mechanics can be a lot of fun, especially when played against others in a multiplayer setting. For those who just want to race fast, wreck hard, and look good doing it, FlatOut fits the bill.

GAME REVIEW :-

8/10

FlatOut Trailer :-