![]() Like any FPS deathmatch, death just sees each competitor respawning after a couple of seconds, letting them jump back into the madness. Stick a dozen vehicles in an arena and let them have at it, smashing each other about until the inevitable explosions begin. Not all of the levels are designed as well as that, but almost every Stunt event offers similar silliness, best with friends (and alcohol, I suspect).ĭeathmatch is quite possibly the best part of the entire game, though. Playing a strange game of beer pong, bouncing your driver into giant, plastic cups to get the highest score possible, is quite addictive. The old Stunt mode returns, wherein you have to eject your poor driver into the air, launching him at whatever happens to be the objective in the current event. FlatOut mode offers a bit more variety, thanks to its mixture of minigames that focus on pure fun, rather than just race-based events. Admittedly, the first time you experience the chaos of that opening stretch, you’ll probably get a giggle out of all the explosions and cars flying every which way, but when the fourth or fifth attempt results in the same lunacy and your car buried in the side of a tree, things get old quickly. On paper, a Mario Kart style race with weapons, sounds like it would be great fun. The coming together of the random physics and the horrendously inept AI is at its absolute worst in the new Assault mode. Hell, if you run into the back of another car, it will brake and slow you down. Take a corner alongside another car and you’ll likely be shunted into facing the wrong direction, or a car in front will slide ahead of you and brake, essentially stopping you dead. You know that “first corner moment” whenever you play a racing game online, when the troll players pile into anyone trying to actually navigate the bend properly? That’s basically ninety percent of any AI interaction in FlatOut 4. The AI doesn’t help matters either, as it weaves all over the road like a drunken student trying to walk home on a Saturday night. And when one of the game’s tracks is set on and around railway tracks, your car definitely should not be launched into the air at the slightest touch of those rails – I literally tensed up every time I approached the vicinity of the railway sections. I lost count of the number of times I had to restart races due to random physics issues, with one notable incident being when my car decided to flip onto its roof, on a flat road with nobody nearby. General handling works well, but even the heaviest cars are lighter than paper, and they bump around so erratically that it’s sometimes impossible to keep pointed in the right direction. In suitably explosive fashion.īut the physics. Almost everything is destructible, from the fences and walls that line the tracks, to the cars themselves – indeed, each car actually has a health bar and if it’s depleted…boom. The racing itself is ridiculous, with destruction being the name of the game. The end result is somewhere between Motorstorm and Burnout Paradise, and it’s instantly manageable. ![]() Once you’ve chosen your starting vehicle, you’ll set off in your first race and discover that the handling is actually quite fun and responsive, straddling the line between full arcade speed and the semi-realism of games like PGR. Career mode is the place to unlock most things. There’s a large amount of content, with tonnes of tracks and cars, but almost all of it is locked at the start. Pick a race type, track and vehicle and off you go Multiplayer is there too (though obviously there’s nobody online at the time of writing, so the quality of the online multiplayer is currently a mystery) with the option to play locally with up to 8 players in a turn-based capacity – no split screen is a disappointment, but Career is where you’ll want to begin. Upon booting up the game, the main menu offers plenty of options from the start at least, with FlatOut mode being a kind of arcade challenge mode, Quick Play being…well, just that, really. It’s a very average game that suffers because of some strange design choices, which makes it all the more sad when you realise how good it could have been. It’s just not particularly great, either. ![]() It’s not an entirely bad game, it should be said. Or maybe it’s just worth knowing from the start, that FlatOut 4 is not the game that should have relaunched this seemingly forgotten series. Is that a bad way to start this review? Maybe. It takes a lot to bother me THAT much, but FlatOut 4: Total Insanity has the honour of being one of those rare games to make me quit in sheer frustration at its glaring faults. It’s rare that I switch off a game in disgust.
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