True Death

Upon booting up Empire Interactive’s FlatOut: Ultimate Carnage I immediately found it to be a refreshing entry in the racing genre due to its stripped down aesthetic and interface. Players are not inundated with car company logos or racing team banners; pushing start on the main menu means one thing only: time to race. The cars have a down-and-dirty design style that immerses players in a seat-of-your-pants underground racing culture that doesn’t care how nice one’s car may look, but rather how many racers can be left in their flaming dust. 

400 Horsepower of Maximum Performance Piercing the Night

While any game that attempts to avoid cloning the look of the competition is nice, it by no means ensures said game will be entertaining, luckily for us Ultimate Carnage packs a lot of solid gameplay in the box. Flatout is, not surprisingly, divided into two separate sections: the Flatout section and the Ultimate Carnage side. Creative, no? |

Flatout is your traditional racing portion of the game. Players start off in various backwoods derbies, eventually working up to big-city street races. Along the way, you’ll earn more money by either smashing the most opponents during a race or finishing in the top three. You will use money to buy newer, faster, stronger cars (note: cars will not cost six million dollars), or you can upgrade your existing vehicles in the aptly named Upgrade Shop. Upgrades are plentiful and diverse, so much so that upgrading vehicles occupies a hefty portion of the game and is an aspect that players will want to exploit in order to prevail in the later races.

The races themselves are mediocre affairs; the tracks are variations on the classic racing environment themes (farm lands, dusty roads, city streets, concrete canals, and so forth) that we’ve seen time and again. The one aspect that helps set Ultimate Carnage apart from other games is its focus on destructible scenery and vehicles. Big money points and rewards are given to the leading destructors (read: racers) regardless of how well they finish in the race. Destruction is clearly the focus of this game.

As I alluded above, Ultimate Carnage is by far the more entertaining portion of the game and is focused almost entirely on breaking lots of fragile items. This section consists of twelve mini-games (three are available at start, the rest must be unlocked) that are simple to learn and far too much fun to play. Some examples include the free-for-all Demolition Derby, a play on the classic crowd pleaser that fills county fairground bleachers across the country, where the only goal is to destroy all of your opponents.  And then there’s Smash-Up where players race through a track trying to cause as much mayhem and collateral damage as possible.

Some of the other game types include oddities such as launching your driver through the windshield in a twisted version of a high jump, or using a car as a bowling ball in a havoc-filled version of drag-race bowling. The physics engine really makes these games shine as the amount of destruction one can cause is matched beat-for-beat by the over-the-top and hilarious manner in which debris will scatter across a racetrack or rag doll forms will bloodlessly bounce along the digital asphalt.

This is Black Sunshine

Flatout: Ultimate Carnage succeeds due to a combination of solid, classic gameplay coupled with fantastic HD graphics. The game looks phenomenal with no clipping during collisions and the incredibly detailed backgrounds help to make the stock racing environments at least pleasing to view; the presentation is admittedly top-notch. The vanilla ‘Racing’ sections may be a bit underwhelming, but the snazzy and creative destruction focused mini-games should keep players challenged and hold their interest. Just be sure to move Flatout: Ultimate Carnage to the top of the pile next your friends are over.