FlatOut: Ultimate Carnage (Preview)

The Good

The game looks great. The cars are well-detailed and have excellent damage modeling, with pieces of the car (the hood, bumpers, doors, etc.) falling off entirely when the car sustains enough damage. Environments look good in general, from the urban environments to the more country-side locales. Things blow up impressively, too (the game has no shortage of explosions), with bright orange and yellow fireballs sporting great particle effects.

It plays equally as good, too. The controls barely take any time getting used to and feel quite natural. Vehicle handling is less "floaty" than in previous FlatOut games, and there is a genuine sense of speed to the game, even though you'll rarely go over 100 MPH during the demo. Destructible environments are a plus, as well, and crashing into objects in the environment and breaking them won't just affect your speed - they can also affect your handling if you hit them right. Crashes feel right and sound right, especially the more high-impact ones. The cars you get to use in the demo - the Venom and Blaster XL, two Derby class cars, and the Sparrowhawk, a Race class car - all sound great, as well.

The Bad

There were some graphical glitches in the game, including tall grass going through your car whenever you unluckily drove off the designated path. The soundtrack is also made up of metal and screamo B-listers, which are a turn off for a good amount of gamers. You can use custom soundtracks, though, as with any 360 game. There's also a notable absence of the aforementioned wacky minigames, which is kind of sad seeing as though they could fit at least one or two on the demo (it's only about 750 MB).

Overall Impression - Good

FlatOut is widely considered one of the few racing game series to get the destruction derby elements right. Graphical glitches and bad soundtrack aside, if the game plays as well as it does in the demo, couple that with the trademark minigames, and this could turn out to be a great racing/destruction derby game. We'll have to see what happens when FlatOut: Ultimate Carnage is released on October 2nd, 2007.