All the most exciting games of the moment -Half-Life 2 on PC, Burnout 3 and Psi-Ops on console - are those that apply physics in interesting ways, creating worlds full of exaggerated kinesis and explosive cause-and-effect. FlatOut is about to join those ranks, perhaps not with the same bang as a Half-Life 2 , but with a definite and satisfying crunch of twisted metal. Based loosely on the world of amateur stock-car racing, FlatOut is a straightforward racer with the one advantage of having fantastic physics.
The damage model is among the best in the business, enabling your car to twist, warp, smash and disintegrate in magnificent fashion.
Bonnets crumple and fly off, wheels distort, exhaust systems drag on the ground. And in a hilarious if slightly disturbing twist, your driver even gets hurled through the windshield onto the road given enough encouragement.
What's more, every object in the environment is imbued with advanced physics properties, from fences and tyre barriers, right through to buildings and heavy machinery. Not only is this a great thing from the perspective of immersion, it transforms the racetrack from a strip of dirt and tarmac into a chaotic physical battlefield. By the end of an average race, the track looks like a hurricane has gone through.
There are no prizes for avoiding the damage either -in fact, you're positively encouraged to cause carnage. For starters; you get a cash bonus for all the stuff you smash in a race, but the control system is also based largely around the concept of smashing. Every time you inflict damage on other cars or the environment, you earn a small amount of nitro boost, often essential to winning a race.
It makes for an interesting dynamic - rather than trying to perfect your racing skills, you have to strike a balance between keeping your car intact and crashing as much as possible while avoiding things that really bugger you up, like trees.
Software languages. Author Empire Interactive. Updated Over a year ago. Last revision More than a year ago. The Sims 2 Create a Sim. Set off round the track and you instantly notice that the skittish, rally-style handling of the original is still very much in effect, encouraging you to slide around comers and occasionally causing wild spin-offs and a frantic scrabble at the controls to get your car back under control.
This time though, you're not just restricted to muscle cars, with trucks. Nitro is gained during races from jumping, shunting your opponents and smashing your way through any destructible scenery that litters the track.
In addition, the physics on show are impressive although they verge more on humour than realism - fences fly, bridges tumble, walls collapse and barrels and debris are thrown across the screen. However, as the quantity of destructible debris decreases, you have to rely more on physical contact to get those last essential bits of boost Here, you need to strike a balance between not sending your car to the scrapyard, gaining more nitro and staying as close to the front as possible in order to get that first place and the cash.
Shunting the other cars around mid-race is also hugely satisfying, although sometimes you find yourself having nudged a rival, only to get them stuck sideways on your front bumper, killing your own speed and making it extremely hard to shake them off. Thankfully, this time round your driver is a lot harder to eject through your own windscreen than before, with this only really happening at high-speed impacts with solid walls - quite understandable really.
To start off with, the levels are pretty varied and will see you racing your way through urban streets, along dry canals, over farmland and through desert, all complete with plenty of short-cuts and alternative routes. However, you soon notice that the tracks on offer are just variations along several themes, and once you've completed the derby level, you may start to find the level design repetitive, although you do get rewarded with extra levels depending on which tier you're driving in.
By far the most fun of these are the derby events, in which the aim is to keep your vehicle in one piece while taking out rivals with the vehicular equivalent of wrestling moves, with the later introduction of special stages and oval racing feeling rather staid and boring in comparison. Besides the racing, FlatOut displays the same sick humour as the original in its mini-games. This time around, the twisted minds at Bugbear have come up with an impressive total of 12 mini-games, in which you compete by making your driver exit the car through the windscreen.
The games on offer vary from high jump through curling to baseball, and although everyone's bound to have their own favourites, stone skipping's a particularly ingenious example of just what fun can be had when you combine a body and some ragdoll physics.
It's all a bit trickier than last time on this front though, meaning that it'll take some practice before you even have a clue what you're doing, let alone nail down the technique. Although this is no doubt intended to add longevity, not everyone's going to have the patience to get through the initial learning curve. In short then, despite the inherent fun of the game, the racing starts to lose its appeal after a while; the main reason you'll still be playing this in six months time will be to challenge a group of mates to a driverflinging competition in the excellent party mode.
The larger number of tracks, cars and mini-games feel like only relatively minor improvements over the original and the whole thing ends up feeling like more of an expansion than the next evolution. Hardly a bad thing considering the original's success, but maybe notquite the smash hit that we'd hoped for. If There Was ever a game that evoked the bygone spirit of Destruction Derby , then it's FlatOut 2 - the only game to accurately model real drivers flying through real windscreens with perhaps an ounce of gravitational artistic licence.
With AI far improved on the original's fastidious circuit-makers and what amounts to an extra number of physics items that equals the number of tennis balls memorably driven into and made to bounce around in largely forgotten early-'90s family comedy Problem Child, then we've clearly got something to look forward to. Here's a picture of some cars crashing. Note how one car has rammed into another, and how it's all been a bit mangled.
We're writing about a sodding car game again. Operating System: Windows XP or further. CPU: Pentium 3 at 1. HDD: 5 GB free space. In this game FlatOut 2 Free Download, users have the opportunity to drive with friends, that adds interest. Also, this game has great destructibility, it is possible to destroy almost everything on your way.
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