FlatOut

"This game is really just meh...AAAHHHHHH!!!! I'M BEING FLUNG OUT OF MY WINDSHIELD!!!!!!!"

It's really kind of tough to innovate in a racing game. Burnout innovates in the fact that you need to crash, Gran Turismo looks amazing, and...well...Burnout makes crashing fun. See, tough to innovate. FlatOut tries to take the Burnout thing a little bit farther. Well...it tries.

GRAPHICS: 8/10
OK. The PS2 isn't very powerful. The graphics are actually not that bad. The damage modeling looks exquisite, and the cars themselves don't look that bad either. At least the ones at the end of the game. When you start, you get some crappy looking cars. The physics for the drivers being hurled out the windshield are pretty good. It's almost Half-Life quality. However, the tracks look kind of the same. They look nice, but they need a little more variety. Otherwise, they're pretty good, but not the best on the PS2.

SOUND: 7/10
Sound effects need to be good for this kind of game, and while they aren't as in-depth as Gran Turismo, they sound pretty well. They've got the engine noises, the crashing sounds, and human screams. Yeah, I think they had everything covered. The music is all European, meaning most U.S. players aren't gonna recognize it at all. A few songs are pretty cool, but all the rest just fade into the background. If it weren't for the music being below-average, I'd be more reasonable with the area as a whole.

MULTI-PLAYER: 8/10
YEAH ONLINE PLAY! I am an avid online gamer, and seeing this here is a joy. You can play with up to 8 players total (counting you) and race in a demolition derby style race or a regular race. It's definitely a lot more fun to play against human opponents in this title than computer controlled players. If they could have had some multi-player for the mini-games sort of like contests, that would have been even more awesome. Wait, if I'm saying all these great things about this area, why does it get only an 8?

GAME-PLAY: 7/10
That's why. The driving controls are not too hard to learn, but they're also not too easy to learn. The A.I. is ANNOYING! They are the typical "rubber-band" A.I. that likes to ride on the tail of your car half of the time and always make you wreck. The bad thing is if you wreck a little, you still lose a lot of time. If you wreck really badly, your driver comes flying through the windshield. That means you lose even more time. Although it actually is satisfying to send drivers flying through the windshield. You can also trick the computer guys by making them use their aggressiveness against them. You can make them wreck and send their drivers flying. The only problem with this is that the concept of sending drivers through gets really old really quick. You can also stem the tide in time trial and mini-games. The mini-games themselves are really fun, but like I said before, gets old fast. There's an interesting and fun concept here, but it kinda gets old fast.

OVERALL:
What we have here is a good looking game that's marred by so-so music, the fact that the graphics aren't able to win in comparison, and the fact that this interesting concept can get stale. Probably only a rental.
FINAL SCORE: 7/10

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 07/21/05