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FlatOut is what happens when people take their love for destruction and death to the extreme. Take crashing, destruction, car wrecks and rag doll physics attached to your driver and you have FlatOut. This isn’t a game about technical racing, pimping your ride, or anything like that. This is a game about smashing up your car as hard as you can to send your driver out the front window as far as you can. Yup. Good times.

FlatOut takes the guise of an off-road rally racer, which means you’ll be zooming down dirt roads littered with pitfalls, barrels, etc. all meant to send your driver through the windshield. It’s a fun gimmick for a while, but it starts to get in the way really quick.

Having your driver fly out the windshield is the games big selling point. On the television ads, it looks funny, and it is for a while, but the triggers that set off the event of your driver flying out is far too random to be fun for long. Bashing head on into a stack of tires will obviously send your driver careening out the window, but then, so will side swiping a car, hitting a curb at an odd angle, as well as other nonsensical situations. It just seems way too sensitive. The problem is made even worse by the fact that the rag doll physics on your driver cause him to flail around a lot, even after he hits the ground, eating away at precious seconds of your lap time.

For a game about crashing and burning, and over the top mayhem, FlatOut features controls for a totally separate style of racer in mind. Hard turns result in little more than powerslides, and turning corners at high speed becomes a total nuisance when the game so strictly forces you to slam the break well before the turn actually comes up, lest you drift off onto some off-track piece of terrain.

The AI in FlatOut doesn’t help matters much, either. It seems most of the time the AI serves only for the sole purpose of taking you down. Not taking the other racers down – taking you down. Only you. I’m not sure if there’s an invisible bullseye programmed onto my back license plate, but the AI seems to be out for my blood on every race.

The game uses nitro boost much like any other racing game of the past few years, but the means to obtain one in FlatOut is a bit different. Instead of earning points for slick turns and the such, FlatOut awards you nitro for destroying the environment during the race. The problem with that, is that doing so almost always results in your driver being shot from the vehicle. From there, you have to use your newly earned nitro to try to regain those seconds you lost during the fall to get back to where you were. It’s a painful cycle that doesn’t make for much fun.

While FlatOut does have its lesser points, the key ideas involved are awesome. The destructible environments provide many opportunities to set up traps for opponent drivers, or for you to be set up. The track is never the same twice thanks to the Havoc engine that powers the destructible elements. Where a barrel may smash your first lap, someone else may have hit it somewhere else by the time you make your second lap. It’s a really dynamic way to keep the game interesting, it’s just a shame the rest of the gameplay didn’t live up to that potential.

The game also features a unique set of mini games for you to enjoy when you tire of the main racing mode: Olympics mode. Here, the world’s greatest athletes compete in heated rounds of Man-Darts, Man-High Jump, Man-Long Jump, Man-Clown, and Man-Bowling. Oh yes, the sport of gentlemen. The idea is basic: speed down a ramp, then your driver gets launched into the air. In Man-Darts, the idea is to bash him through a dart board, in Man-Bowling, the idea is to use him to knock down pins. You get the idea. The overall is pretty shallow, with little replay value after a few hours, but there’s just some charm to watching a little person smash through gigantic bowling pins…

Online multiplayer offers up some replay value if you can find a server. Since there’s no AI, racing becomes completely unpredictable and furious. There’s some lag issues, sadly though, that cause teleportation problems and collision detection issues. The game usually runs pretty smooth, though.

The games visuals are pretty slick, which is a plus. The games cars bash up quite nicely with the engine used. You’ll see your car dent and smash in real time as you wreck your way through the games nicely detailed courses. The problem though, is that there are too many similarly themed courses through the game. I don’t have an exact count at the moment, but you’ll be seeing a lot of farms in your time with FlatOut. The music is pretty forgettable, and the inability to add custom soundtracks on the Xbox version is a bit of a bummer. I have to say, I had a strange urge to listen to Black Betty while speeding through the farmlands. Oh well.

FlatOut is meant to cure your itch for total vehicular mayhem, and it does, if only for a short while. The overall gameplay itself is decent, but the twitchy (and gimmicky) man-flying-out-the-window gets old fast. There should have been some tweaking going on there to make it less, how you say, every 5 seconds. The game has promise to be sure, that promise just isn’t used to its full potential.