FlatOut Ultimate Carnage

BugBear Interactive’s FlatOut series has been providing off-road focused spills and thrills for several years now across a few different systems. Now the series is finally making its debut on the Xbox 360 with FlatOut: Ultimate Carnage. Aside from the obvious graphical boost, Ultimate Carnage will also feature some new enhancements from previous years on the gameplay side of things, offering a new FlatOut mode that allows you to play through a career mode of sorts.

The FlatOut mode begins by having you select from three different “junker” cars to drive throughout the first parts of the campaign. After getting your car, you’ll be off to the races and selecting one of three career paths: derby, street, and race (since your car is a piece of crap to begin with, you’ll only be able to start off with derby). After this point, the game opens up nicely. Winning races or even simply performing well (ramming into opponents and so on) will earn you credits, which can be spent to upgrade your car or buy new ones, should you earn enough.

The racing in FlatOut: Ultimate Carnage feels a lot different from its biggest obvious competitor in the genre, Burnout. The physics are much more grounded and feel less arcadey, meaning you’ll have to learn to be technically proficient and adept at using your brakes and gas. Another important element of mastering the driving in FlatOut is being on the lookout for road hazards and debris that may obstruct your path on the track. Hitting objects will slow you down quite a bit, and may even jettison your driver right out of the car.

Graphically, the game looks mostly great. The car models are gorgeous and damage accurately depending on how you beat the crap out of them on the track. The environments look really good too, and are chalk full of nice attention to detail and added effects, like dynamic tire tracks and destructible environments. However, there are some odd issues here and there, like a strange clipping problem (grass will pop up through your car, distracting the overall aesthetic), and the framerates can get a little boggy at times. However, the game still looks quite good overall.

The sound effects in FlatOut: Ultimate Carnage are pretty good, with nice engine sounds, but nothing too extravagant. The soundtrack is composed of some lesser known punk-emo bands, but sounds good within the game’s context.

FlatOut: Ultimate Carnage is already on shelves in Europe, and doing quite well. However, it doesn’t ship for a week in the US. Still, once it lands, US gamers should find a solid racer and a viable alternative to the Burnout series.