The re-release of FlatOut 2 with some additional content and online multiplayer has all of the elements of a great fake racer. Unfortunately, almost everything in the game is designed to make you feel cheated. The graphics are nothing to complain about, if you don't mind the same three settings constantly repeated for all the racing events. All the track have been given facelifts, and are now very crisp, seamless, and pleasing to the eye. The framerate is rock solid, no matter how many cars, explosions, scenery objects, and road effects are going on at the same time. Cars steadily shed their parts as they beat each other down , and it can be funny crossing the finish line on three wheels. Sound is a mixed bag for me here. The crunching and scraping of cars is nice, and the sound of opponents being thrown through their windshields is even better. The soundtrack, however, has been washed out since the original FlatOut2. Gone are Papa Roach, Nickleback, Rob Zombie, and Yellow Card. Instead you now get a bunch of wannabe, sound-alike punkers and rockers that leave each track indistinguishable from each other and are entirely uninspired, save for Ditch Kitty. Bring your custom soundtracks with you for this one. The actual game is where I lopped of most of the my score for this game. On the plus side, the controls have been greatly tightened since FlatOut 2. It feels less like piloting a hovercraft and more like driving an automobile now. Also, the loading times are quite short and when restarting there is no loading whatsoever. Unfortunately, that is where the refinements stopped. Bugbear left every single cheating mechanism they had in Flatout 2, and that game rewrote the book on this. First off, every single race in the entire game has you starting out in last place (12th), no matter if you took gold or didn't finish the last race. Just once it would be nice to even just start off somewhere in the middle, for diversities' sake if anything. On the whole, 9 out of the 11 CPU drivers could give a hoot about winning; they just want to hold you up so that the designated winner (usually the new country cowboy Lei Bing) can get ahead as she races a flawless race. This leaves the game feeling like a constant 11-on-1 instead of a free-for-all race. As you play the eternal game of catch-up, you'll follow other drivers as they plow through unthinkable amounts of junk that litter each track; they almost never lose speed. You hit a tin can the wrong way, and you lose 30 KPH off your speed. Said tin can also has the uncanny ability to absolutely -launch- your car into the air and you have to watch all the other cars pass you as you do an inexplicable series of cartwheels, barrel rolls, and roof slides. This happens less and less as you progress, but it can make the first 1/3 of the game very frustrating. One thing that never stops in the invisible magnet that follows you throughout the game. Every time anything goes slightly wrong, you have about a 87% chance of attracting this magnet (percentage taken from in-game testing). The magnet is perfectly in tune with the front of your car. It is totally confounding and unforgivable the amount of times you end up facing backwards. No matter how fast or slow your spin, whether you do nothing, turn into or opposite the spin, you'll be backwards. You'll even get to watch your car suddenly stop in the middle of a mad spin and go the other way so that you -perfectly-, each time, face exactly backwards. Now you can take the time to turn around again and again, or use the game's extremely punishing restart button, Sure you get a rolling start, but somehow those racers that were leagues behind you are suddenly in front of you again. They think you won't notice with the screen flashing white, but you see it. The extra singe-player content takes form the new Carnage mode, a blatant FlatOut ripoff of Need For Speed's challenge sheet. You are given a specific car and must complete the task at hand. This is where the horrifyingly dull stunts from FlatOut 2 have been moved. Same stunts, same bore, although the music now plays in full force instead of being tinned into 1950's stadium speakers. It's not just stunts, though, now there are deathmatch derbies(like normal but cars have less HP and there are power-ups to be collected), Beat the Bomb(timed checkpoint races), and Carnage Races. There are some gems to be found here, like the derby you get to man a big rig and the gold medal in attainable only through fragging the other drivers DOZENS of times, or the carnage race you get to drive a school bus that is an absolute powerhouse and must have a turbine engine under the hood. However, the cheating factor slowly build up as you advance and culminates at the final Carnage race - a race that is so unfair that any court in any jurisdiction would rule it cruel and unusual punishment. The only way to truly score the 100,000 points before time runs out is car-bashing your opponents, and they know that your multiplier is based on current position. For this race everyone is in a car that can exceed 300 KPH. However, you are constantly thrown into a void between racers. If you chase the car(s) in front, you'll put so much distance between the cars behind that you'll never see them again. If you slow down to below 100, they will too. It's like I said before: they don't even act like they care about winning (no matter what their bios say on the loading screens), and just work collectively to screw you over. All that being said, the game is still somehow at times, thanks to the good sense of speed and - It's just too bad that most of the time winning is more of a "thank goodness I don't have to do that again!' than not. Finally, the multiplayer. Here is the biggest saving grace of the game. Since you are racing real people instead of cheap, cheating drones, the game is balanced out and skills are met with skills. You can play any of the game's modes and can set the cars to varying degrees of tuning presets. Lag is minimal and tensions quickly rise as you throw each other through windows of deparment stores or pummel each other to oblivion in deathmatch. While every other fake/arcade racer out there is selling out (Need for Speed, Burnout), it's nice to see some are still sticking to their guns. If you don't mind putting up with some blatantly absurd cheatingm the single player FlatOut Ultimate Carnage can be fun at times. With a serviceable multiplayer setup and some shining moments in both FlatOut and Carnage modes, Flatout: UC would be a great choice to buy used.
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