Today we are going to take a look at Flatout 4: Total Insanity. This new installment in fairly popular Flatout series promises more arcady driving, more explosion and more ridiculous game modes then ever before. It is available on Steam for 44 Euros and 99 cents or your regional equivalent.
With this review you have a choice of either reading it here in text form or listening to the video review. They both contain the same content.

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Video review

Text review

Gameplay

Who among us hasn’t played some game from the Flatout series in the past? I don’t think there will be lot of people watching this who haven’t at least had the chance to play this at a friends house, but even more likely, you owned one or more of the previous games yourself. And if I should be totally honest, I think the creators of Flatout 4 got a bit stuck in the old times, but that isn’t necessarily a totally bad thing. But before I explain to you why exactly I think that, we should take a look what the game has to offer in terms of mechanics, modes and all the other stuff you will be doing in game.
So let’s start right off the bat with the thing you will most likely spend the vast majority of your game-play time with if you are playing this as a racing game. The races obviously. And first off all, all the races are first divided into three basic categories – based on what type of car you want to drive with. You start with the derby cars, essentially old wrecks fitted with powerful engines, nitro and anything a speed and explosion loving maniac might want. Then you move on to the classic cars, which is very similar to the derby in the terms of getting the powerful motors, boosts and all else your heart desires, but this time instead of wrecks, you get a chance to drive your “Joe Every-day's” car. And last of all, we have the Allstar category, where everything just gets more extreme then you might consider even under a cocaine induced blood-rage.
Each of these categories then gives you 8 different cups – series of races to speed and wreck through. Each of these cups is then comprised of a number of races, ranging from two races for the starter cups up to 6 races in the final cup of each category. And to be honest, this is a freaking huge amount of racing available for you.
But so you don’t get bored with just driving around the games circuits, each of the categories also has 8 additional events for you to compete in and these are either Time Trials, where you are racing against the clock, but to make it a bit harder, you don’t get a chance to use nitro in this mode and the Arena Survival, where you and eleven other cars are put into a giants arena and the only goal is to wreck havoc. An well, to survive as well.
And you do have two ways to engage in any of these types of races. Either you can play the career mode, where you progress through these cups, starting with the derby cars and building your way (and money reserve) up to being able to compete in the Allstar category.
Or, if you are just in the mood for a single race, you can always use the quick play mode, where you just set up what mode you want to play, which type of it, on what track and on top of that you get a two modifiers – the nitro gain percentage and the damage modifier – plus in certain types of races, you get to set up how many laps or how long will the mode last.

So now we know what type of races are available and we should talk a bit about how they feel. I have spent about 5 hours racing in Flatout 4 and in general, the races do feel good. Driving in satisfyingly arcady, the destruction you can create is just awesome, whether you want to smash other cars or wreck the environment, which is BTW very much destructible. So many things along the tracks can be smashed and the game even takes a bit of their weight into consideration as some of the things along the track will slow you down far more then others.
And while I enjoyed the racing for the most part, I do have a few gripes with it. The first is, the game sometimes feels a bit inconsistent in how you drive over certain objects – like train tracks. Sometimes you will go over them almost without a bump, but on occasion, it will make your car go completely haywire. But luckily, this wasn’t the case very often, but still, it was more then irritating when it did happen.
The second issue I have is with the fact that the game does feel very unfair at times. And for a casual arcady racer, I don’t think this is the correct way to go with the difficulty of the game. And what I mean by unfair is the fact that some of your foes in races just have much faster cars then you have, even if your car is fully upgraded, so if you get unlucky, you are just unable to win a race due to the fact that your foes will be quicker. That means you have to drive without major flaws if you want to win every-time. But altogether to racing feels good, not the greatest (as I do remember enjoying some of the older Flatout installments better), but still good enough.

Okay, that’s it for the races. But Flatout has always had a big say in purely fun modes, where the aim is something ridiculous. Now we will look at these Stunts, as they are called in Flatout 4. Just take make it clear, these modes are something that is best played with a friend, so you can compete with each other for scores – making them perfect party games.
We start with Total destruction. And probably the easiest way for me to describe this is by calling Flatout Angry Birds. Your aim is to destroy as much of the environment as you can. Secondly we have Golf. And as the game mode’s name suggest, you play golf. You want to get your driver that is being ejected from the car as close to the holes or ideally into the holes. Next is Long Jump and I don’t think I need to say more, then, fly as far as possible baby! Then, we have the Billiards mode, which for those who are unfamiliar with bar games, is a version of pool, where you need to put the balls into pockets on sides of the table. And that is exactly what you do here. Next we have Finnish Pins, which is sort of a variant of bowling, but instead of trying to make all the Pins fall, you are trying to only make certain pins fall down, making the value of pins on the ground exactly 25 in the end. I will be honest, I have no idea how the scoring works in the Finnish Pins.
But nonetheless, the next stunt mode is Cup Pong. And if any of you ever attended university or at least saw a movie that happened in American universities, you most likely know what this is. You need to get the driver into the cups. Then we get to one of the classics of Flatout – Rings of Fire, where the ejected drivers has to fly between as many fiery rings as you can get him to. After this mode, we have the Soccer mode, but a better name would be a Free Kick in my opinion, he the aim here is to score a goal through a line of defenders and a goalie defending the goal. Another sports inspired mode is Baseball, where you are essentially the pitcher, but instead of wanting to miss the bat, you want to hit it. We will follow this by Stone Skipping, which is one of my favorite child-hood games, and it pretty much the same here, you want your driver to go as far as possible getting as many jump from the water as you can.
And the penultimate stunt is Curling – one trying to represented one of the strangest things to ever be called a sport in my opinion – you know, the know where sweeping the ice with brooms is a part of it – and to be honest, I like this mode better then the original it is representing it. Your goal here is to get the driver as close to the center of the space you are landing in as possible. And the last mode is High Jump. And I don’t think I have to say anything about this mode at all.

All of these stunts have a few things in common. First off, you are given a very different car then you have in the races. This car has big ass rocket and thus gets really really fast quick. And that is very much needed, because the stunts require your driver to fly out of the car at very high speeds. The second thing all of these modes have in common, is the fact that somewhere along the way you eject the driver out of the vehicle. On PCs this is done using the Shift key. So you press it, hold it for a while to get him flying out at the right angle and release. Then in the air, you can push it one more time, to give him a bit of a nudge, either to gain a little bit more height, speed or whatever you need to get the best score in the particular mode you are playing at the moment.
And there is one more thing and I already mentioned this, but it is something that should be repeated. All of the stunts are something you are FAR more likely to enjoy if you are playing it with friends, trying to compete with each other. This does really make them super good party games for nerds, as trying to score the highest jump while alone just isn’t the same thing compared to yelling at your friends while drunk. Treat them as such. But even if they are just that minigames that you will play only with your friends, it is soo awesome that the developers put the time in to implement them.

Graphics

Now that we talked about most of the game-play, lets take a look at how to graphics feel. The game uses the KTHD engine which was developed by the Kyloton also know as Kt Racing Games and does a pretty good job at look good while being well optimized. As you can see from the footage, the game look pretty nice. For once, I can actually say I like the effects better then I like the rest of the game, as specially the dust, ice or whatever is flying from behind the cars in front of you does look really good. Though it makes the game much harder if you are chasing after someone.
The textures could use a bit more detail in my opinion, specially if you take into consideration the fact that I am actually running the game at 4k (even though I have only a 1080p monitor – so up-scaled essentially), but they aren't particularly bad.

Sound and music

One thing the Flatout series is well known for, is its music. The games always use these punk, punk-rock and metal songs and the tradition wasn't broken here. And if you are a fan of this genre of music, you might even be willing to find more of some of these bands and download them. While I do like punk and punk-rock, I’m also very conservative in what bands I listen to in my spare time so I didn't do that, but I did enjoy most of the songs. And even if you don’t like them, you can easily skip them with a push of a single button.

Performance

As I already mentioned in the graphics part of the review, the game is more then well optimized, running above 60 FPS on my rig even in 4 resolutions and well above 150FPS in 1080p.
And except the occasion weird interaction of the collision model the game didn't seem to have any bugs nor did I experience any crashes.

Conclusion

So, in conclusion: Flatout 4: Total Insanity is decent arcade racer. It isn't ground-shaking nor it is the best arcade racer at the market it does fill a place of a game that doesn't totally focus just on racing and there will no doubt be many people who highly enjoy this. And if you are one of them, I will certainly recommend Flatout 4 to you. But if you aren't in a rush I would suggest you wait for a sale, because the current price of 44.99 is a bit too high in my opinion, something along the lines of 25 to 30 Euros (or dollars) would be the price I would recommend this game very happily for.