Reviews of Flatout: Ultimate Carnage

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Really enjoy this game!! If you like driving mind blowing fast and then crashing into objects and other cars, and of course watching them blow-up, you won't do much better than this game.

Make sure you've got a beefy machine to run this, especially a good video card. It's the only way to do this game justice.

Had to knock off one star due to the music. A little too hard core RAP Crap for my liking. Could have thrown in something for the 40+ driving fans who know a good driving game and what good music is. Have fun!!

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This game is lots of stupid "bash the other guy with you car" fun. There are several fun race modes including, but no limited to, racing (in three classes: derby (using junker cars), race (using smooth racers), and street race (using the famous cool looking sedans and coupes everybody knows), and demolition derby (bashing good fun!). The graphics are pretty good (not incredible) and run smoothly on my modest rig (2.4GHz core 2 duo, WinXP, 2GB RAM, 2ms monitor, nVidia 8800GTX video, and SB LIVE! 24bit sound).

Some game modes are smashing fun that will make you laugh out loud. Like the driver throw. It's tremendous fun. To play online you need to register a LIVE account and an xBox account (exactly as in Kane & Lynch: Dead Men).

One tiny flaw of the same (in my opinion) is the music. They definitely dropped the ball here. The "heavy" metal is not heavy at all and you best turn it off completely and enjoy your own WMP in the background. People who played NFS:U2 (remember the soundtrack?) will understand me.

Overall the game is pretty fun and probably worth buying.

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My family loves this game. We all play together, taking turns driving. The game is simply VERY fun. It may not be the best sim, the hottest cars, the most glamorous settings etc but all together, the sence of humor, action, and mood make it one of the best games I have ever played. I use a logitech g25, and a 101 inch projection screen and this really makes the fast paced action come alive. Runs great in Win 7, and controllers work perfectly. I highy recomend it. I wish they would make a deathtrack like version with guns etc. I think they would do a good job.

Honest reviews on Flatout: Ultimate Carnage

You'd never think of driving your car into another car in real life, but in this game, you get _points_ for doing that. And nitro. Bonus! So, you get used to looking for other cars which are vulnerable to a big hit, and you go after them. It's quite satisfying to "blast out" another driver (knock him/her through their windshield). And the more damage you do in the hit, the more points and nitro you get.

Sounds violent, but this is about escape. I have a lot of stress in my life right now, and it's a great way to blow off some steam.

Game Modes: Flatout Mode and Carnage Mode.

Flatout Mode: This is a sequence of increasingly difficult races. Each set of races comprises a "cup". You must win or place highly in multiple races to win the cup and move on. You must win 3rd or better (Bronze) to advance. Each cup you win opens a bonus race--either a Carnage Race (points for winning, passing checkpoints, and damage to other cars), a Demolition Derby (usually a deathmatch--survive as long as you can, and get bonus points for the damage you cause), or Time Trial (reach a time goal on a track--no nitro). When you've passed enough cup levels, you get some big bonus cash and unlock cars. There are three Flatout levels: Derby, Race, and Street. There's also a bonus level which uses all cars. Each level uses faster cars and gets increasingly harder. Nice thing: you don't have to finish a given level to start the next level (e.g., you don't have to finish Derby 100% to start Race, etc.).

You have to manage your cash in Flatout Mode to get the best car for your driving style and trick it out to be the fastest and strongest it can be. The mid-level bonus cash coincides with unlocked cars, so it's a nice time to upgrade. You might have to buy a car in order to figure out if it's right for you. It's a bummer that you only get 50% back from the investment if you decide to sell, but at least you can sell it if you need to. Keep in mind that you can do cups and bonus events as many times as you wish in order to build up cash.

Carnage Mode: This is more of an arcade mode. You might be familiar with "get this many points and unlock this next event" kinds of games, and this is one of those. You start out with a Carnage Race, a Stunt (using the driver as the projectile!), a Demolition Derby (do as much damage as you can with four lives), and a Beat the Bomb run (go as far as you can and pass as many checkpoints as you can before your car explodes). For each event, you get points. At certain point levels, you open up new events. You then do those, get more points, open other events, etc. This is a nice mode to be in if you only have a few minutes to play (which frequently happens in my house). There are probably (I'm guessing) about 40 or so events.

In Carnage Mode, the cars for each event are chosen for you, and so you get a lot of variety. This can be a good thing, but it also means that for each event, you have to learn the quirks of the particular car. They all drive differently.

The stunts are really fun and interesting. Many are quite hard, and require some practice to get right. The carnage races are fun, the Beat the Bomb runs are my least favorite (I just do them for the points), and the Demo Derbies are great fun.

Stunts are done in a stadium atmosphere with some very European-sounding, incomprehensible blather coming from a PA announcer. Meh.

The Demo Derbies at the end get quite hard--the last one is with the smallest, weakest Derby car, which makes scoring points way hard.

In addition to the Flatout and Carnage modes, there's also a Single Event mode in which you can pick any event to do.

I hate the music and I have it turned off.

All in all, a fantastic game that cost me about six clams. I plan to continue playing this one for a long while.

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I just got this, and I have to say the price is worth it. I'd expected Flatout Ultimate Carnage might be a pretty tired rehash, given that it's up against the likes of Gran Turismo, Grid, Need for Speed, Sega Rally Revo and especially Burnout.

Thankfully, Flatout seems to have pulled the best features of its competitors together in a game that's not very sophisticated, but is a lot of fun. Here you have the environmental physics of Sega Rally Revo and Dirt: standing water, mud, dust, and pavement all have an effect on your vehicle. You have the damage gradient of Need for Speed: Pro Street in that your car can lose bits and pieces of itself and get a bit shaky, but it'll still run all the way through the race. And finally, you have the crazy antics of Burnout: crash your car (or other players), smash into things, and you charge your boost meter. Wreck spectacularly to get achievements. Tap the "Reset" button and you plunk back down in the middle of the road, in the middle of the action.

As if that isn't enough, like its cousins in the genre, Flatout lets you keep a garage of many cars, customizing each to your liking with specific upgrades. Since the physics is an integral part of the enviroment, you feel the difference with each vehicle and each change you make to it. You go through a career mode with multiple race types and varying tracks. Some tracks will repeat themselves across tiers, but the fact that you have a different goal (e.g., race versus derby mode) makes it never a dull moment.

The only real drawback to Flatout Ultimate Carnage is that it is easy. I'm no pro, but I quickly climbed the ladder. Many places in the road are designed to hand you stuff to smash into so you charge your boost meter, most AI drivers aren't too smart, and I often found myself with a nice healthy addition to my boost meter if I had to reset the vehicle: use it immediately and you're back up to speed within seconds.

One other drawback for PC users is that this game really doesn't play well with a keyboard. It's awkward, and without bothering to map the keys to some custom configuration, I found it much easier to just go ahead and use the XBox 360 Controller like the manual tells you to. You'll find the biggest advantage in the gas pedal: on the keyboard it's either full throttle or coasting when you tap the accelerator, but on the XBox 360 Controller, the trigger understands the difference when you just give it a squeeze: it picks up on the nuances you need to handle your car through the curves.