FlatOut 3: Chaos & Destruction

FlatOut 3: Chaos & Destruction
This game is a huge disaster with a franchise!
Genre(s): Action Racing Platform(s): Microsoft Windows Release: December 13, 2011 Developer(s): Team6 Game Studios Publisher(s): Strategy First Country: Netherlands Series: FlatOut Predecessor: FlatOut: Ultimate Carnage (by release date) FlatOut 2 (canonically) Successor: FlatOut 4: Total Insanity

FlatOut 3: Chaos & Destruction is a racing game developed by Team6 Game Studios and published by Strategy First for Microsoft Windows. It is the fourth main installment in the FlatOut series and was the first to not be developed by series creator Bugbear Entertainment (who was busy developing Ridge Racer: Unbounded for Namco at the time). The game was bombarded with negative reviews from every possible angle and was even named the worst game of 2011 and even one of the worst games of all time.

Gameplay

The game has as many as 9 modes where you can drive monster trucks, race normally, jump out of cars through windows, measure speed, race off the road, race at night or smash other opponents' cars.

Why It FlatOut Sucks

1. The physics in this game are completely broken. Hitting an opponent's car at full speed hardly does any damage to it yet slight taps and grinds can sometimes do 40% damage to your car when it obviously should be the full speed collision that does the most damage. All in all, you can think that the game was created somewhere in a month because of this physics because the developers did not fully refine the game.
2. The cars react very strangely to collisions. You can slightly tap a wall and your car will spontaneously combust upon impact, but 120 mph smashes will go unnoticed which can make the gameplay incredibly frustrating especially because of the AI ​​which will be mentioned below and shows that the developers obviously had to rush it to make it on time.
3. Every car feels extremely similar to one another and any differences between them are superficial at best as if the developers lacked creativity to construct some interesting and different vehicles, they just created the same one and then copied and pasted it with only minor cosmetic changes.
4. Controls somehow feel stiff and slippery at the same time, which can lead to you crashing into things and this is why it happens, especially if we add the above-mentioned broken physics and exaggerated bouncing of cars from other objects, and this will give an absolute nightmare during the game and you can't get any pleasure from it.
5. The cars' handling are very poor as they often feel weightless but barely turn at any speed above 30 mph, requiring you to drift to negate this, which itself doesn't always have you pointing in the right direction. This can already give the impression that the game has not been tested at all, which is a worthy example of this broken control and lack of balance in it.
6. Every car has terrible handling in this game. If you choose the highest stars handling for your car, it will still suffer from understeer just like the trucks in Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing. This means that the handling's rating stars are a lie and it also clearly shows the laziness of the developers accompanying them while creating this game and that they didn't care at all how these cars work.
7. Bad opponent AI: Opponents are more focused on crashing into each other and you than racing, which makes most races a breeze if you manage to work around the controls and car handling, to put it simply, the developers did not want to test races or program the AI ​​better so that it actually wanted to win, rather than wallowing on the route and pathetically hitting other rivals.
8. Almost every mode in the game is a slightly modified version of racing or demolition (despite the only difference being car count, Derby and Big Battle are two separate modes), so you can say that in this game there is literally three only the developers changed the names to hide their laziness as much as possible.
9. The tracks are bland and lifeless with no alternate routes or variation but simply these are areas made at the lowest possible cost to simply release this game faster, and sometimes even cosmetically change the route and copy it.
10. The car and character designs are laughable and do not look anything like the previous FlatOut games (unsurprisingly, due to a change in developer) which is why it's hard to call it an installment of this series because of the complete lack of any reference to the previous parts of this series.
11. Once you unlock the armoured tank, it is ridiculously easy to cheese a lot of races as its cannon turret can insta-kill any car in a large splash radius. Additionally, since the turret is not disabled during the countdown to the start of the race, you can kill everyone before leaving the finish line and easily win first place! At this point, the gameplay loses any sense because instead of racing, it's just getting from place to place without any challenge.
12. For some reason, a lot of vehicles not made for most race modes can be used in other race modes, making them look out of place while also allowing you to unfairly win races. For example, you can use a knock-off of the Batmobile from The Dark Knight in Speed instead of F1 cars.
    • Similarly, the AI racers can also use out-of-place vehicles too but due to their dumb AI being only programmed to race in regular cars, they'll end up getting permanently stuck behind indestructible environment like lamp posts or stop short of the finishing line instead.
13. The graphics are terrible for 2011 standards and are comparable to early PlayStation 2 or Xbox games (in fact, Burnout 3: Takedown, a game from 2004, has better damage modeling and textures than this) and after all, this is a game from the end of December 2011, so the game could look a lot better.
14. The sound effects sound lackluster, especially the crashing sound effects and sometimes they don't even sound like they should, the developers just didn't even want to listen to them, they simply put the first random sound in the world.
15. The soundtrack is forgettable and repetitive. It does not even have licensed songs, rips out music from your PC's music folder without your knowledge and even plays ambient sound effects at times. This caught racing YouTuber Shinyodd off-guard when his copy of the game suddenly plays the Arabic Nokia ringtone. Developers probably didn't even have enough budget to license the soundtrack and instead decided to create their own although it's a good thing that they wanted to create something their own way because at least it shows that they put more effort into the game.
16. The game manages to make the fun modes of past FlatOut games, Stuntman and Derby, incredibly dull and lifeless. The developers apparently didn't even play the previous installments of this series and decided to just create it their way thinking that their version will be better when it apparently isn't.
17. The game was made at a bad time, where Bugbear Entertainment was busy with Ridge Racer Unbounded, so Team6 Game Studios worked on this game.
18. This game likes to crash a lot. You can crash while trying to skip music, you can crash while choosing a game mode, you can crash while spectating other drivers, you can even crash when trying to load anything. This game is basically one giant error. The developers didn't seem to care, and either they didn't want to fix it, or worse, they didn't even want to test how the game worked.
19. Statistics are not being tracked properly. Even the erroneous values for cars destroyed and races played are being interpreted as floating-point values instead of integers! All in all, this is another proof that the creators didn't care how the game works at all and did not evaluate the gameplay, which is the most important part of the game.
20. Some characters are just blatant copyright infringements, like Zin Benzin (who is just actor Vin Diesel as he appears in the Riddick franchise with his surname being German for gasoline), Zario (a mix of Mario and disgraced former porn actor mh:reallifevillains:Ron Jeremy), Ufer Bull (a mix of Agent 47 from the Hitman franchise and infamous film director Uwe Boll), and Thirtyfour Rupias (a poor man's 50 Cent as ₹34 = US45¢). Some of their backstories don't even make sense, like X-mas2011 (who would name their daughter like that!?) and Silen Einnor, the last one not only never appeared in previous games (technically he does according to Rerez, but only his model as the default human male), but his name is a reverse of Team6 Game Studios founder Ronnie Nelis.
21. This game nearly killed the FlatOut franchise, until 2017's mh:awesomegames:FlatOut 4: Total Insanity.

The Only Redeeming Quality

1. At least the menu is decent, unlike the rest of the game.

Reception

FlatOut 3 is currently the second worst rated game of all time on Steam, behind War of the Three Kingdoms and also the worst game of 2011 and even one of the worst games of all-time. Likewise, it also holds a Metacritic score of 23 out of 100, with only two reviews scoring the game at a score above 4 out of 10 (Gaming Nexus and GameSpot).

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