FlatOut : Web Wombat : Games

Driving, racing or car games - whatever you want to call them - have come a long way since the top-down stuff made for the arcades in the 1980s, such as Super Sprint or Ivan "Ironman" Stewart's Super Off Road.

Me, I'm a massive fan of car and motorbike games and even motorboat ones too, and I feel privileged to have been able to witness the evolution of these games in the imagination-fuelled industry that we call videogames.

When titles like Virtua Racing and Gran Turismo and Destruction Derby hit the Saturn and PSX, the masses were enraptured by their realism and cool 3D graphics, and games like Project Gotham et al have helped inject a little variety in the driving genre in more recent times.

And now European developer Bugbear has come to the party, adding another innovative feature that will help evolve the genre further, and will no doubt be copied and refined in the years and decades to come.

That single feature is the driver. "Yeah Will, we've seen drivers in heaps of games - you suck loser. Go back to Loser Avenue in Suckville," I hear you say? Au contraire, my character assassinating friends, for the drivers in FlatOut react almost like in real life.

They won't hurl abuse at you, but hit a truck at 140km/h and the driver will hit the front windscreen, burst through the glass and then proceed to fly through the air as he or she screams, and in the process you'll witness some rather gruesome but undeniably amusing rag dolling. Best of all, you simply hold down the accelerator and it all happens in slow motion, so you can watch every little hyper-extension and bone breakage in supreme detail.

With this feature, Bugbear is making its mark in the realm of driving games, but cool features aside, if it ain't no fun you're up faecal creek without a paddle, rag dolling or not. But it is fun, lots of fun, which is a great relief. Imagine how much it'd suck to be the blokes who came up with a poorly executed, but great new feature? Quite a lot, one could argue.

The meat of the game lies in the career mode where you must rise through various trophy championships, winning cash as you go. This cash can then be spent on upgrading your ride with superchargers, lighter flywheels, new clutches, suspension and tyres or, if you have enough spondoolies, you can even purchase a new car.

When you're ready to hit the track in FlatOut, you can throw your racing lines out of the window and forget about the marshals giving you a drive through penalty for roughing up your opponents - it's a fuzzy wuzzy free-for-all.

Car hits guard rail at 143km/h, car
takes big hit, driver goes flying into dam
(he's highlighted for your viewing pleasure)

As soon as the green light illuminates, my usual course of action is to veer sharply to the right and smash the crap out of the closest four wheeler I can find - repeatedly and with gusto - because in FlatOut, you get rewarded for being an arsehole. Just like in real life!

Every time you clip an enemy with a bit of force, or better yet totally wipe him out (and of course ejecting the driver for you to run over soon after), you get a little extra turbo boost, and having a half tank of nitrous left on the last lap when you're duelling with a very competitive rival is often the key to winning.

The way the cars behave on the tracks are best described as low-grip. You'll be racing in generally older automobiles - pretty much all of which are rear wheel drive - and the surfaces are seldom made up of bitumen.

Most are gravel or dirt and sometimes even snow, which means most of the time you'll be oversteering (or powersliding if you will) round the corners.

There are tracks with sealed roads, about 20% of the circuits on offer, but even then rear end of your ride will still be flaying out wildly as you powerslide with slightly more grip round the corners.

Learning the tracks is the quickest way to success in FlatOut, but whether you're a newbie or a veteran, the racing is always entertaining. Watching your driver take the lead as he flies out of the front windscreen after clipping the edge of a barn is as funny as it is heartbreaking.

While I found myself restarting tracks time and again after dropping back to 8th and realising I'd never regain the lead, it was never with my head hung low. In fact it was usually with a big grin and wide eyes, as I looked for the scumbag who nudged me off the cliff in the last race. Payback time!

Things can get a little frustrating when it seems like even the inanimate trackside objects are out to get you (the stacked tyres are the worst offenders), but this means that even if your racing lines are perfect, you can still be shafted and so the racing never becomes tedious or samey.

Shortcuts also play a large part in FlatOut and help you regain the lead in any given race, yet while some are very obvious, with road markings pointing the way, others are well hidden. The most rewarding shortcuts usually involve smashing through the doors of barns or flying over massive jumps.

Thanks to realistic physics, intricate
damage modelling and cool graphics,
the crashes are never dull

This driver is attempting the high jump. You hit a
vertically leading ramp and then you're airborne

The AI has actually been coded quite tightly, and the CPU opponents give you a good run for your moola, smashing into you without provocation, but also racing well and keeping up a good pace.

The difficulty level is fairly tame to begin with in the career mode, but once you've passed the bronze trophy things get quite tough and if you don't quickly learn that full throttle all the time is a definite no-no, you'll probably skip the circuit racing and go straight to the bonus games out of sheer irritation.

And even though it'd be a shame to miss out on some of the really long tracks found in the games latter portions, the bonus tracks pure gold.

Rather than flat out racing (though there are a few oval circuits) the bonus tracks must be unlocked by completing the trophy cups (bronze, silver, etc.) and are comprised of demolition derbies and a number of gigantic fantasy features, including high jump, long jump, darts and bowling.

Unlike the normal racing modes, these bonus games reward you for sending your driver vast distances. The boost button becomes the 'eject' button and you simply mash it when you want your driver to fly.

Here's a typical scenario: Accelerate through a short-ish straight, then eject the driver from your car and watch him tumble and flop at 100km/h down the polished wooden floors of a bowling alley. Then "BAM". He smashes into 10 gigantic pins. If you score well, you get a cash reward too.

Perhaps funniest though, is when you stuff up your trajectory and your little leather-jacket wearing driver gets his head smashed into an iron pole, then falls the ground with his back twisted at a most uncomfortable angle.

While these bonus games are great fun for a quick bash when you've got hard-to-please guests visiting, every time you want to collect your cash, you must exit out to the main menu, where you have to endure not one, but two laoding screens. It's nothing major, but after repeated bonus games it can get on your nerves.

And that's really the only shit thing about FlatOut - the loading screens are too numerous. Other than that, it's actually a very decent game, making use of realistic physics, and as you can tell from the screenshots, it's also a very sexy looking game.

The damage modelling on the cars is quite intense as they can be completely deformed with enough 'work', and the more damage you take, the harder it is to steer, accelerate and stop. Exhaust pipes will dangle, wheels will buckle and everything but the car's subframe can be bent out of shape.

The framerate is sky high as well, giving a tremendous sensation of speed, and the blurring effect when you activate the nitrous is pretty cool too. If you like titles such as Dirt Track Racing and its ilk and enjoy big power cars and low grip tracks with plenty of argy-bargy along the way, Bugbear's new racing game, FlatOut, will appeal.

It pushes the driving genre to new levels, opening up a new avenue of play with the independent driver, and though it may not be Colin McRae or Gran Turismo, it certainly has its own distinct charm.

Game: FlatOut
System: Xbox
Players: 1-2
Online: No
Developer: Bugbear
Distributor: Red-Ant

Rating: 85%

(Ratings Key/Explanation)

FlatOut is on the shelves now.

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