FlatOut

FlatOut has a good balance of destruction and racing. The driving mechanics and realistic physics are convincing. Recommended! I'll have fun playing it, thanks GOG!

You'll have a whole load of fun with this game. This is Flat-Out's destructible environments and well thought-out upgrade system before the handling and environments became boring and toned-down for the sequels. Those who are used to Flat Out 2 and beyond might have a hard time hanging on to the car but you'll get in to it, the real challenge is in driving here. It's not particularly hard for a sim veteran like myself but it's nuanced enough, at least, that driving a fast lap or getting a good side-swipe or pit on an opponent feels rewarding. Flat Out 2 has its qualities, of course, and the mayhem was turned up to 11 but it lost that rallying feel and sense of actual vulnerability that made avoiding that stump/rock/barrier/opponent so much more rewarding.

Triple roll over in the air because of slightly touching a curbside at mid speed? Sure! Flying 30m out of the windshield because of slightly hitting your door/side at a rail? Of course! The graphics are nice, the music is good, the execution is a mess. Of course it's different from FlatOut 2, the physics seem more realistic at first and make the game harder, why not? Seems legit, you simply use the brakes a little more and don't push the pedal too hard. After a while I constantly got situations like mentioned above and thanks to the weird collision query that surrounds a thin lamp post with a thick invisible tree which you still hit when you aren't rouching the post at all, things like this happen a lot. The controls are the next problem. It is not possible to use the right analog stick for acceleration and brakes, so you have to rely on buttons for this which practically results in feet of lead always instantaniously kicking through the irons when pressed. I usually don't quit games before I finished them, but after buying a very expensive car, upgrading it a lot and being halfway through the gold cup I deleted the game because the problems with controls and physics. The AI...the distance between the first few places and the rest is usually huge. Use nitro for preventing far slides out of corners, if you use it for more speed you'll end up crashing and flying very far because of the many hills placed right before MANY tight corners in the tracks...

Flatout, well is Flatout insane. If you enjoy cars fliping across your screen or blowing up into each other, then Flatout is the game for you. The later games have improved game play and user interface. Very fun series.

The game looks decent for its age and has a nice soundtrack (although after a few repetitions it becomes quite obvious why those bands didn't get to make a world-wide career). It is a racing game but it's nowhere near a decent one. True, the environment has many destructible objects (no, it's not that the whole world is destructible) but the tracks are made so that you inevitably do destroy those objects - because it's so natural that there are trucks, concrete silos and other objects scattered all over racing tracks - don't you watch rallies and F1? The "physics" model is even worse than in Grid so it's telling something. The "AI" cars will happily crash into you and spin you out or push you into obstacles. You won't really be able to do the same to them. There is a huge amount of rubberbanding. And don't even get me started on "return to track". You lose so much ground and positions with this. It might be fun for an hour or two but then quickly just gets frustrating and annoying.