Total And Utter Video Game Awesomeness

By Will Barker

When videogames were young, in an age when the CIA had carte blanche freedom to tap phones, most car racing games could be described with one Oxford dictionary approved word: shitful.

These days things are better. The car racing genre in the videogame industry is one of the most profitable in the entire market. 

Millions upon millions of dollars get spent on developing these high tech titles as the gaming industry bulldozes its way toward a potential implosion of neolithic proportions, readying us all for the apocalypse.

As such, it's nice to play a game that's both an enjoyable racer but one that adds something novel to the mix, and FlatOut: Ultimate Carnage is just that.

It's enjoyable in that the game is neither too hard nor too easy. It looks awesome with heaps of flashy - but tasteful - eye-candy, and the racing is competitive.

Most importantly however - and unlike the current car racing games du jour that make the headlines such as Gran Turismo, Forza, and Project Gotham - it places an emphasis on deconstruction.

As The Offspring song sagely observed, "Smash it up".

Flatout: Ultimate Carnage (FUC) is one such 'smashy' game and, to put it succinctly, it's brilliant. If you don't want to read the whole review, do yourself a favour and go get it today. It's tip top.

The third game in the Flatout franchise, and at present an Xbox 360 exclusive game, FUC places a discernible emphasis on extreme confrontation. 

It's a highly approachable game too. The intro grabs your attentions, showing displays of mass destruction with a superb level of visual acuity that whets the appetite for the carnage to come. And because the controls are not hard to pick up, it's fun for the whole cave-dwelling religious fundamentalist family with an Xbox 360.

The right trigger accelerates, the left brakes, the A button activates your nitrous boost, and the analogue stick steers your car. That's it. Kick a$$!

After the introduction sequence dies down, you arrive at the main menu, where there are a number of options to choose from:

• Flatout Mode

• Carnage Mode

• Xbox Live

• Single Events

• Party Mode

The meat of the single player game is found in the FlatOut Mode. Check this option and you'll be given some cash to spend on one of three 'entry-level' vehicles at the start, and a couple of tournaments to enter.

It's quite involved too. Not only is this single player career mode quite large, with hundreds of races to plough through spanning three different car classes (and a bonus fourth 'mixed' mode) and 39 different race tracks, but you can tweak your car with turbos, upgraded suspension, new gearboxes and so forth. 

The customisation isn't as intricate as Gran Turismo or Forza Motorsport 2 and there's no visual or cosmetic tweaking, but it gives you something to work towards. When you upgrade your nitrous system you'll see big performance changes on the track, so there is some real world application to the upgrades too.

The three racing classes in the Flatout mode are derby, street, and polygamy. My bad, the other one is racer. They're pretty much grouped in terms of performance from slow to fast and you unlock the second two groups by winning races in previous categories.

Getting into the guts of the game is fun. And challenging too. Each race within the Flatout mode comprises a 12-player race against the CPU and they are always hard fought, but impressively rewarding. 

The racing aspect of the game is highly enjoyable for a number of reasons. Cue the dot points:

• Frame rate

• Physics engine

• Sound Effects

The physics engine is very tidy, and I would say it straddles a nice middle-ground between sim and arcade. The cars feel heavy and real and just like the weighty metal chunks they aim to mimic from real life.

Best of all they deform very realistically. Every major crash, minor nudge, and middling shove results in some sort of damage to your car, and it gives the game a thoroughly reactive, "yes there are consequences" feel.

The game plays like a rally racer of sorts, yet there are some road racing elements in there and traditional racing lines do come into play as well. Think of it as a hybrid between Colin McRae and Burnout and you'll have a decent idea of what to expect.

The graphics likewise are sensational, with stunning particle effects (smoke and dust effects are second to none), excellent reflection mapping on windows and water, and a super smooth frame rate. On a flat screen high definition TV the game looks splendid, or "breathtaking" as my long-time gamer pal Nicky Hilton put it.

The flame effects are also very impressive, and the many explosions that occur in the game are eye-meltingly good, with excellent flame effects as well. And though it may not be the full 60fps that everyone yearns for, it comes tantalisingly close. Suffice to say the sensation of speed is fairly realistic.

Collision detection is impeccable too, and slamming into an opponent results in a satisfying kinetic reaction,  and it all adds up to an incredibly involving experience. Some of the dirt tracks can be quite challenging when grip is at a premium (sometimes it's difficult to lay off the accelerator) but it's a very rewarding game to play.

Augmenting the vibrant visuals are some very peachy sound effects. The cars sound good, as does the nitrous boost, but it's the collisions and the noises that the breaking of wood, metal, and other materials make that give the game an authenticity few others in the genre can lay claim to. The audio is not 1200% authentic, but Scandinavian developer BugBear has done a good job in adding in relevant effects that do help you become immersed more in the gameworld.

The score is made up of fairly average rock music, but it seems to be licensed and suits the game's attitude well enough.

One of the key tactics when you're racing through the career mode is to hit your opponents and get air. You are actively encouraged to bash the crap out of your foes, because every time you violently collide with an opponent, you get some nitrous boost. The incentive to physically push your own agenda, so to speak, makes every race a barrel of laughs, and you also get added nitrous when you hit trackside objects, of which there are many, and when you get air on the many ramps placed throughout the tracks.

Speaking of ramps, these sometimes lead to a multitude of shortcuts that almost all of the 39 race tracks contain, and if you boost just before the ramps -- yippee-ky-yay futher-mucka.

Most of the Flatout mode is comprised of 'cups' that consist of between three and five races, and a leaderboard. Which I really like. Having to finish first in every race is a real bitch at the best of times, but a 1st here, a 4th there, followed by a 2nd in the final race can often lead to victory overall, which lessens the pressure somewhat and makes progression far less frustrating.

Each race and cup win rewards you with cash to buy more cars and vehicle upgrades, but you can gain bonus cash in each race by doing one of the following things during a race:

Slam: Hit an opponent really hard.
 Power Hit: Hit an opponent really, really hard, with nitrous preferably.
Fastest Lap: Race well, race fast.
Super Flip: Make an opponent flip out - easier done than typed.
Monotreme: Primitive egg-laying mammals restricted to Australia and New Guinea.
Blast Out: Can't remember this one... I think it's pushing a foe into a fuel barrel.
Crash Out: Nudge an opponent into a concrete barrier.
Wrecked!: Totally destroy an opponent.

Yeah, I had heaps of fun playing the through the main career mode, unlocking new cars, selling old ones, racing for hours on end, bashing my way to victory and competing on the bonus one-off tracks like the banked speedway - which is completely ballistic in a very kamikaze way. Overall the track design is quite cool, and there were only one or two annoying circuits. The water canals in particular were some of the coolest tracks, with huge ramps that make getting airborne pleasurably simple.

It wasn't until I finished the main Flatout mode that I tackled the other areas. Next in line was the Carnage mode, which requires a little elucidation first. Like the Burnout franchise, FUC puts an emphasis on destruction, but one of the coolest things about FUC is the realistic driver modeling. 

I'm not going to argue that other games out there don't also provide a little driver inside the 3D representation of a race car, whose teeny triangular arms turn the steering wheel in unison with the vehicle. But how many games can lay claim to flinging the driver through the front window in the event of a crash, the driver screaming the whole way before his body succumbs (most violently) to the laws of gravity?

Not a one - save for this game and its prequels. And it rocks like a chair on curved rails.

Okay, so during the career mode races this feature makes the big crashes hard to tolerate (I smashed the controller a few times, and there's also teeth marks on it now....), but the Carnage game modes where you actually have to slam into concrete barriers or send your driver crashing out of his car seat and as far or as high as possible add an element of enjoyment and humour that no other racing game can match.

Such shenanigans - while eternally hilarious - would be intolerable without a realistic physics engine, but as I've already stated, Finnish developer BugBear has gotten it just right, and the rag doll effects when spines snap and legs become invariably inverted made me laugh till I tasted vomit and wept plasma.

The Carnage mode is like the Horse mode of the Tony Hawk franchise in some ways. And you can do the consecutive multiplayer thing as well, which is good. You start off on a long runway with a jet powered car and basically get it up to speed and then try to angle the car so as to fire your driver out the windscreen at the perfect angle and velocity. 

The many and various objectives include the straight forward high jump and ski jump, which reward players for launching their drivers as far as is vertically and horizontally possible respectively. But there are also some more interesting modes, such as bowling. 

You have to knock down 10 giant pins with your rag-doll driver, and the game allows a small amount of mid-air acrobatic adjustment to fine-tune your drivers haphazard trajectory. The stone-skipping challenge is awesome (bounce the driver across the water), as is the fire rings challenge. 

What begins as an erratic hurling of your driver to his ultimate peril eventually becomes a skillful challenge that requires finesse, and is ultimately a very cool addition to an already rewarding game.

The Xbox Live mode is self explanatory - and heaps of fun (unless the CIA phone taps are sapping bandwidth...). You get online, play against another seven strangers/friends and smash each other to pieces. The 8-player modes include deathmatch derbies and head on modes, which are in addition to the standard racing modes found in the single player game. 

I found the online aspect to be quite enjoyable and does add a great deal of interest to the game, and being able to trash talk your foes into making errors is a harsh but necessary way to win. But if you don't have Xbox Live, it's not a deal breaker as the single-player game is very solid, and fairly lengthy too.

The second last mode is the Single Event, where you can compete in everything the game offers but in one-off events, from last-man-standing destruction derbies, to classic races, carnage mode events like human bowling, and heaps of other stuff.

Party mode is like the Horse mode I mentioned before, and is essentially a 'hot seat' multiplayer version of the Carnage mode. Up to eight players take it in turns to manipulate the driver through the car windscreen and across vast distances to the adulation and laughter of everyone crowded around the TV. It's a very nice addition and makes for a very cool party game that rivals the likes of Mario Party in terms of accessibility.

And that's FlatOut: Ultimate Carnage for you; one of the best new generation games I've played in a long time. It looks sensational, it handles well thanks to intuitive controls, there's heaps of variety and the gameplay is as exciting as it is rewarding.

This is the game that Motorstorm on the PS3 should have been. There's heaps more depth, the destruction is fantastic, there's very few glitches, and if you're not playing the 8-player online multiplayer games, the enemy AI is still charged with vemon and quite capable of pushing you off a bridge and towards your ultimate destruction.

In a nutshell, this game is excellent. There are a couple of visual glitches here and there that stop the game from becoming true-blue classic, and it may not be to all tastes. Yet it surprised me so much that I think a new Oxford dictionary term is in order: snazztastical.

Game: FlatOut: Ultimate Carnage
System: Xbox 360
Players: 1-8
Online: Yes
Developer: BugBear
Distributor: Activision

Rating: 85%

(Ratings Key/Explanation)