FlatOut Ultimate Carnage

An evil glint in Paul's eye...

When you include the phrase 'Ultimate Carnage' in the title of a racing game you're pretty much setting your stall out from the off, especially when you're talking about the latest in the FlatOut franchise, not a series known for its lack of carnage to start with. Forza 2 this isn't, instead it's unashamed arcade racing at its destructively-crazed best. Now in its third game the FlatOut series has been running since 2004 but this latest Xbox 360 exclusive offering marks its arrival on the next-gen stage. However, to call it a whole new game would be a little misleading, instead Ultimate Carnage is really a re-working of FlatOut 2 but don't let that put you off, as the result is really rather special.

Looking at FlatOut on paper there's an obvious comparison to the Burnout games just begging to be made, but load it up and it doesn't take long to realise there's a sense of dirty oil stained fun here that sets it firmly apart from the more sterile crash-em-up antics of Electronic Arts racer, in fact it's actually far closer in spirit to the old Destruction Derby games from the PS1 days. Much like many other racers out there the central premise behind FlatOut UC is simplicity itself, buy a car, participate in tournaments, earn money to upgrade your car, unlock more tournaments by winning the existing ones, buy faster cars to compete in these faster races allowing you to earn more money to upgrade more cars, etc., etc. What Flatout UC does a bit differently is reward you not only for fast driving but also for frankly evil driving. The more damage you dole out to your opponents the more money you earn. This means each race finds you walking the fine line between trying to finish as high up the field as you can and trying to take as many other cars out at the same time. Of course, even that isn't especially revolutionary; instead what really makes Flatout UC great, what sets it apart from most other racers out there, is its wonderful tracks. Or more specifically the ability to almost completely destroy the environment around these wonderful tracks.

Realistic interaction with in game environments is something games have really only just started to take seriously, after all it wasn't too long ago that we first marvelled at how bumping into a chair in an FPS made it move and fall over in a realistic way. These kind of physics have now happily become commonplace, but for all the progress made some things still always fail to ring true, we've just got used to them. We still don't bat an eyelid when a rocket launcher can't blast its way through a locked wooden door or flimsy crates are found to be perfectly good cover from German machines guns, we all know none of this would happen in the real world but we're happy to accept it in game worlds. Racing games may suffer from these problems less than other genre's but drive a lap of many racers and you'll see immovable trackside objects like fences, sheds and advertising boards that the experienced gamer in you knows will more than likely stop you dead if you hit them even if they shouldn't in real life. Not so in FlatOut UC. Drive a speeding car at anything from a fence to a petrol station and it'll splinter, crumple, bounce or, in the case of the petrol station, explode in pretty much the way you'd expect it to (in a Hollywood action film type of way). Such wanton destruction is FlatOut's shining light and each track has been designed to maximise the carnage you can cause. It's not all just chaos for chaos's sake though, as much fun as smashing through a load of scaffolding can be, the other plus point is that the resulting mess can slow down the other cars (and you on the next lap if you're not careful, though) meaning there's a point to the destruction as well. Most importantly however it simply feels right as you play, when the rear end of your car looses grip and smashes through a shop window before finding traction and powering away the first time you misjudge a corner slightly, you realise how limiting it's going to make other racers feel. It'll be hard to accept going back to games when your car would have simply bounced off that window after spending time with FlatOut UC.

It's not perfect though, there's a downside with all that carnage, while the whole game never pretends to be anything other than an arcade racer and is as far from a realistic simulation as you can get, there's still some physics quirks that would feel just plain odd in any context. Most noticeably there's a general lack of weight about a lot of the debris you smash into and almost none of it really impedes your car's progress like you might expect. While that's fine for boxes and garden furniture I don't think it would be detracting from the 'arcadeyness' of things too much to have a hulking great water tank, or the aforementioned petrol station, feel a bit more substantial when you smash into them. It's also not always consistent with its definition of destructibility allowing you to plough through a shop front on one track but then have a rickety old wooden shack bring your car to a juddering stop on another. Annoyingly there have also been times where shunting another car square on has caused it to become stuck to my front bumper for the rest of the race robbing my car of all its power and ruining any chance I had of winning. Call this a realistic depiction of what could conceivably happen when you try to shunt another car from behind or call it a physics bug, either way it's annoying and for a game so intent on throwing true realism aside and embracing the fun of destruction it seems a strange 'feature' to have let slip through play testing.

FlatOut UC knows it's at its best when races are close hard fought affairs and it does its damndest to ensure this is always the case with some fairly obvious elastic band AI keeping all the cars bunched close together. Love it or hate it, this means that victories are rarely emphatic thrashings but crashing horribly never means you're out of the race entirely. That's not to say it's ever forgiving, in fact it's probably one of the harshest racing games I've played for a while. By keeping the whole pack of cars so close together one little slip, one corner mistimed or tree not avoided can see you slip from a race winning position to eighth in the blink of an eye, something that can cause much gnashing of teeth when it happens half way through the last lap. Also, unlike other racers where you can often sit down and start winning races from the off there's a real sense of playing catch-up to begin with in FlatOut UC, once you know the tracks and you've powered up your car a bit it all feels a lot more competitive but till then you'll be cursing every little mistake as you see the other cars flash by undoing all your hard work. Not that having to put the effort in to reap the rewards is a bad thing, in fact personally I enjoyed not finding the first few races easy, having to accept a few fifth and sixth places while I was earning money to upgrade my car to make it competitive was fun and made the victories, when they started to come, all the more rewarding.

The action itself is split up into a variety of races styles, you've got your normal track based races and time trials but there's also arena based destruction derby events where the aim of the game is to simply destroy every other car with the last man standing, or driving, declared the winner. These events are spread across three different classes, Derby, Race and Street which get naturally faster as you progress. All the time you're (hopefully) unlocking new cars and earning money to upgrade them as you go which is what keeps you coming back as each car and class provides a distinctly new challenge. There are also the expected multiplayer options too and these prove to be just as manic as you're hoping. If you fancy a break from racing you can also try your hand at some delightfully ghoulish mini games that involve driving a car down a runway before ejecting the driver through the front window and using him as the projectile in bizarre takes on games like darts, basketball, stone skipping, bowling and curling. Watching your poor driver smash into a dart board or bounce down a giant bowling alley is worryingly entertaining and there are enough events on offer to make these mini games alone a viable way of spending a few hours with some comrades after a few drinks.

With so much going on all the time you'd almost forgive FlatOut UC if it didn't look quite as good as other games, but thankfully the developers have done a fantastic job and created one of the best looking racing games ever. The tracks are as detailed as they are destructible with everything rendered beautifully as you smash your way through it. The frame-rate is as smooth as silk too, with not a hint of slowdown even when things are at there most manic with all twelve cars on the same bit of track.

My moan about some of the physics quirks aside there's really not much bad to say about FlatOut Ultimate Carnage, and even those things are easily overlooked when you're having this much smile-inducing fun, which means we're left with something of a gem. It's a game with a huge sense of fun, it knows what gamers want and isn't ashamed to deliver it in spades. Its unforgiving elastic band AI and relatively steep learning curve may put some people off but they'll be missing out on one of the most enjoyable racers around and should be taunted accordingly.

90%

By Paul Newcombe