FlatOut 4: Total Insanity Review – PC

I love racing games and I love spectacular crashes, so it’s no surprise that Burnout and FlatOut are two of my favorite franchises, and I was tremendously excited when I heard a new FlatOut game was coming. Past FlatOut games offered all that redneck racing action along with demolition derby arenas and everyone’s guilty pleasure; the Stunt mode, where you would launch your ragdoll driver in a series of addictive mini-games. The good news is that all of that is back in FlatOut 4: Total Insanity, but somehow this just isn’t as fun as I remembered.

Let’s start with content…oh so much content, but sadly most of it is locked through progression gates so unless you are super-patient and diligent you likely won’t experience it all. From the opening menu you are given several options including the massive career mode, FlatOut mode, Quick Race, and Multiplayer which can be either online or local hot seat. Quick Race offers racing, arena, and stunt options. FlatOut is an extensive mode consisting of 42 events all locked with a point gate system, so you have to earn points in earlier events to unlock later ones.   These events include; Deathmatch, Beat the Bomb, Carnage, and Stunt. Stunt is the party game mode where you launch your driver in crazy games of Cup Pong, High Jump, and Destruction; a big hit with Angry Birds fans.

There is so much to do from the opening menu it might be hard to settle in for the 60+ hour career mode that starts with three options; Derby, Classic, and All-Star modes, each requiring a certain class of car. Your starting cash allows you access to the Derby and you’ll need to earn at least $30k to enter Classic, and $57k for All-Star. To put that in perspective at the 12hr point I had earned a total of $24k and spent half that to fully upgrade my starter car. It took nearly another ten hours before I could sample the Classic mode.

Breaking it down even further, the Classic mode consists of 16 events including Derby, Time Trial, and Arena (survival) modes, and occasionally the regular racing mode may turn into Assault mode and toss in weapons. While this may sound fun believe me it is not. It is “total insanity” and not in the good way the title may have you hoping for. You have four weapons; bomb, shockwave, bollards, wrecking ball, and using any of them consumes a portion of nitro. For those thinking, “I’ll just use my nitro to boost into first place” that just means you have seven other drivers all gunning for you in races that have not been this unfair since Mario Kart. You’ll spend a good portion of these combat races dying in slow motion then dropping into last place while you wait for your car to reset on the track. Not only is Assault mode unnecessary, it nearly ruins the game.

Time Trial is racing at its purist, and with nitro disabled it is all about knowing the track, its shortcuts, and having a properly upgraded car to hit that gold cup time. The Arena is also great fun, relying on your ability to hit the other cars while avoiding getting hit yourself. Randomly appearing power-ups help with this giving you all sorts of scoring and destruction perks as you try to be the last car running and hit the top of the scoreboard.

Of course the big party favorite is Stunt mode where you launch your rocket car for a short distance then launch your driver through the windshield as you attempt to steer his flailing body into assorted mini-game targets. Games like Destruction really showcase the game’s fantastic physics engine, and all of these mini-games are super-addictive whether you are playing in competitive couch mode or just trying to climb the leaderboards.

The big issue I had with FlatOut 4: Total Insanity is that the career mode quickly turned into a grind. After the first three or four gold cups you will have earned enough cash to fully upgrade your starter car, so there is nothing left to aspire to except to earn enough money for a new car. Perhaps the most annoying observation was that even with a fully maxed out car, every other AI racer was always faster than me. In most racing games you reach that point where you zoom out to an early lead and never see the competition. In this game you’ll be racing for your life and if you’re lucky win by a fraction of a second on your 23rd attempt.

Speaking of trial and error, about halfway through the Derby series you’ll reach a difficulty wall that will have you racing every race anywhere from 10-40 times before you secure that first-place finish. You’ll quickly learn to know when it’s better to hit Restart than to waste your time trying to finish. There is no rubber band AI or throwaway victories in FlatOut 4: Total Insanity. You earn every trophy with blood, sweat, tears, and blisters. In some races it literally gets down to the point where you strategically have to plan out which parts of the environment you are going to smash on which lap to fuel your nitro boost.

Surprisingly, nitro does more harm than good. Earned by destroying the environment or smashing into other cars, when you kick in the nitro and the screen blurs you are likely going to end up in a ditch unless you know exactly where and when it’s safe to use it.   Plus the temptation of smashing trackside objects is often offset by the danger. While you can smash through smaller trees, telephone poles, wooden fences, a glass storefront, or even an entire house, hitting a tiny orange traffic cone can send your car flipping skyward. WTF!

As far as presentation, the graphics are a messy mix. Some levels look great while others; not so much. It seems the more objects there are the fuzzier the details, and things get blurry and muddy. Most of the cars are ugly; both in design and textures, and even applying unlockable skins cannot hide their rust-bucket origins. And when you do unlock some cool new cars later; actual race cars with blowers sticking out the hood, you are still getting beat by junky trucks and something that looks like a Model-T roadster.

The winter tracks look great, and the races through the warehouses and sewer drains are crisp, mostly because they lack all the excessive textures of tracks like the lumber camp or any of the races that snake their way through dense forests and dry riverbeds. I’ve only played the game on PC, but it seems like I am only able to get console-quality visuals, even with a GTX1070 card on a high-end gaming PC. The framerate wavers between 50-60fps, usually dipping when there are multiple cars in front of me or during those insane Assault modes where everything is blowing up all the time.

You can race from chase, hood, and bumper views, but there is no way to set a preferred view so every race starts in chase view and you have to change the angle if you prefer another. I normally like hood view, but FlatOut 4: Total Insanity has the annoying tendency to stack debris on your hood totally blocking your view until you slam on the brakes to send it flying off. I suppose it’s realistic, but it’s also annoying to penalize a player solely on their view preference, since chase view drivers aren’t affected.

The soundtrack offers a nice selection of indie tracks, but the 35 tracks will start to get repetitive after a few hours; especially in a game where you are constantly restarting which also cues up a new song, making it hard to hear an entire song. The music volume is also too loud by default, blurring with the aggressive engine noises to create something quite painful to the ears over time. It does seem they are pretty proud of their soundtrack, as there are three volumes of music currently available as DLC for $10 each.

FlatOut 4: Total Insanity played much better in my mind before it released when all I had to go on was screenshots and trailers. Now that I’ve played the final product I can only say I am disappointed. While all the elements are here, there is something just off about the game. I don’t mind repeating an event 30-50 times if it’s a Stunt mode event, but when it takes me 43 (yes, I counted) attempts to win the third race of the fifth cup series, I start to get annoyed. And having all your content locked behind progression walls of cash and points may turn off the more casual gamers.

Available on console and PC, the Steam version does get some nice exclusives that make the $40 price tag seem like a better deal. In addition to all the “Steamy stuff” you also get an exclusive arena (Ice Lake), two exclusive drivers, and two exclusive vehicles, and Steam Workshop support is about to launch, which may add tremendously to the longevity of the title if the community support stays strong. Given how hard it has been to find people playing this online over the past weeks, I fear the game may lose its momentum before Workshop support is available.

At this time I personally cannot recommend FlatOut 4: Total Insanity to anyone who is a fan of insane racing or the previous FlatOut games. The graphics are a mess, the Assault mode is totally broken, the AI is brutally hard and unrealistic, and there is just too much trial and error involved to even win a race. The Stunt mode offers limited entertainment, but even that isn’t as much fun as I remembered. For $5 less you can buy the deluxe version of Gas Guzzlers, which offers nearly all the same content (minus the Stunt mode), and that game looks and plays infinitely better than this. With so much content and no motivation to experience it, FlatOut 4: Total Insanity sadly runs out of gas long before it’s over.

Author: Travis Young
I somehow managed to turn my doorman job at The Improv in Dallas TX into a writing career for CBS. When I'm not adding my geek culture to your favorite sitcoms, I'm slowly adjusting to California life and enrolling in just about every racing driving school available. So far, I've driven NASCAR, Indycar, F1, and Rally Off-road and like to compare the "real thing" to games.

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