FlatOut 4: Total Insanity

Total insanity. The definition of total insanity is complete or absolute foolishness or irrationality. There's little doubt that this is an apt description of FlatOut 4. The title revolves around madness, wanton destruction and the carnage that follows. It certainly works in delivering the promise the title gives, though not always for the reasons you would expect.

For fans of FlatOut your patience has been rewarded; the series has reached its zenith at a time when nobody expected it to resurge, let alone do so with such brutal conviction. For the rest of you, FlatOut 4 is the perfect antithesis of all those sensible racers out there; a real, rough around the edges prospect that demands your attention.

In this case, total insanity doesn’t equate to total fun; it equates to frequent failure. Albeit, often financially rewarding failure. No, the finer moments of FlatOut 4: Total Insanity are to be found when it’s either being more restrained or just all-out daft: when you’re chasing checkpoints around a cluttered track with a clapped-out old banger to prevent it from blowing up, or flinging your driver from their seat just to see how high you can get them. It maybe shouldn’t be that way, but it just is.

FlatOut 4: Total Insanity has a solid foundation to draw in new fans, and is a welcome addition to the genre for fans like myself.

FlatOut 4: Total Insanity is better than I’d feared but not as good as I’d hoped. Kylotonn has dredged this near-forgotten racing rebel from the very bottom of the barrel and fashioned it into a basic but fun, stunt-filled speedster, but I found myself regularly frustrated with its repetitive career mode, its stingy economy and nebulous unlockables, its superficial demolition derby events, and its uneven difficulty. A respectable franchise rescue mission but one that still needs some fine tuning and some extra grunt.

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I really, really wanted FlatOut 4 to be good. So many modern racing games take themselves too seriously, and Total Insanity offers the promise of a destructive something different.

I wanted to like FlatOut 4. I had such fond memories of the first game, the sequel and even after the misstep that was FlatOut 3. I was hoping the fourth entry would be a return to the ridiculous destruction racing I enjoyed both alone and with friends earlier in the series. The short-lived but exciting FlatOut modes are great fun for a minute, but between the unexciting visuals, frustratingly unpredictable collision physics and overly aggressive AI, racing in FlatOut 4 is too hostile to be fun.

In so many ways this feels like a driving game from another age, but no matter how much you miss old school arcade racers FlatOut 4 will end up driving you crazy.

Once you do get racing against other players of similar skills then any sense of fair play goes out of the window and you use every dirty trick and underhand tactic to get in to first place. With eight racers the crashes can be spectacular pile ups with cars, logs, and half a house smashing across the race track in front of you, and, as previously mentioned a lot of swearing, but a lot of laughs as well. Silly fun, and well worth your cash.

New studio Kylotonn didn’t make it easy on themselves when they choose to revive the FlatOut franchise. For those of you out there unfamiliar with the series, FlatOut is all about car carnage. In the game you’ll find yourself racing rev’d up junk heaps, tricked out rides and radically painted turbo vans. But it’s not all about the race, from taking out other racers in the destruction derby style Arena mode to tossing your driver through the windscreen like the point scoring ragdoll th...