Flatout Ultimate Carnage is an engaging arcade racer, and has its moments of pleasure to offer. If for nothing else, buy it for the stunts.
Aditya ‘Anorion’ Madanapalle
FlatOut Ultimate Carnage is the third instalment of the Flatout series. The game was developed and released jointly by Empire Interactive and Bugbear Entertainment. FlatOut Ultimate Carnage is an arcade racer with heavy emphasis on destruction. The other cars can be wrecked, your own car can be damaged till all the innards are showing, pillars, tankers, vehicles, dividers and even entire shops in the environment can be smashed to bits, and to top it all, the cars are driven by crash test dummy-like figures that can be driven over or humiliated in a score of ways.
The game suffers from a serious console hangover, with even the menu interface asking you to navigate through it using the A and B keys. The game offers a career mode, a carnage mode, a multiplayer mode and a party mode. The career mode lets you buy cars and race them against other players. At first, you will get what seems to be battered cars, but later on in the game sleeker, slickermodels open up to you. The loading screens show a virtual opponent you must handle in the race; all of these characters are so unoriginal that it is painful.
The carnage mode is much more addictive, offers a more fluid gameplay, and is more rewarding than the career mode. It is a mixed bag of different racing styles, combining races, deathmatch derbies, beat the bomb runs and stunts. The races encourage you to smash through the surroundings to gain nitro, and cross the tracks in time. The game is very demanding, and requires you to plan out the tracks well in advance. The game does get a little irritating when you get stuck for no fault of your own — either by a pileup of cars, which is pretty common or a pileup of smashed material, which is uncommon but which eats up precious time. Deathmatch derbies is more or less like automotive warfare, with powerups available in an arena, and loads of smash able things strewn around. The beat the bomb runs are fun too, where you have to cover as much ground as possible before a bomb in your car goes kaboom. The most interesting and fun aspect of the game are the stunts, which is the part where you thrash the virtual driver in inventive ways. You can hurl him through rings of fire, aim him at a dart board or a target, play baseball using him as the ball or send him skipping over a pool like stones over water. This game definitely has one of the most detailed driver models we have ever seen in a racing game.
The party mode is a fun little feature that lets you play all the stunts from one interface. There are a few preset sets of stunts that you can play, and it is configurable to allow many players to take turns playing. You can also make your own customised stunt bouquet. This game gets a few cookie points just for concoting this mode and all the stunts inside it.
The graphics are excellent; there are no questions about that. The level of detailing is also appealing. What makes the game go that extra mile is the realistic foliage, the grass, and the splashes of water. When a car gets wrecked, there is this a huge and totally cool fireball that takes up the entire screen. The soundtrack is mostly made up of slightly heavy rock songs by bands like No Connection and Dead Poetic — egging you on to some serious demolition.
It’s a pity that the game does not have any kind of local multiplayer mode over LAN. Apart from that, it is an engaging arcade racer, and has its moments of pleasure to offer. If for nothing else, buy it for the stunts.
aditya.madanapalle@thinkdigit.com
SKOAR!: 6.5/10
Publisher: Bugbear Entertainment/
Empire Interactive
Distributer: Milestone