Flatout 3: Chaos & Destruction Reviews

FlatOut 3, heh? It should be called ShatOut 3 because this game is a complete travesty. The physics are as broken as a shattered vase, the soundtrack is either not there at all or entirely sucks, the steering is so unstable that it hurts to drive, and by the end of it, you'll be laughing so hard at how bad it is that your voice with turn into nothing but empty air. Not even the settings are done right. When my controller is set to keyboard, it instead recognizes my Xbox One controller. But when it's set to Xbox One controller settings, my controller doesn't work at all. Seriously, this game does absolutely nothing right, and I'm shocked at how this game managed to follow up the fantastic FlatOut 2 at all.

Let's be real, everyone knows Flatout 3 sucks. But it is possible to enjoy it at times. The car designs are unlikely to win fans among the fully-sighted, and for the most part their handling is intolerable, but there are maybe one or two per class that drive ok and are usable. The physics are... strange, but you get used to them after a bit. Events are very highly configurable, you can choose everything from the number of laps to the number of opponents and even what car classes the opponents are allowed to drive- but despite this events still tend to be very short and difficulty is all over the shop from race to race. The one event that does last a good amount of time is the derby events, which I would argue are the best part of the whole game despite the very simplistic AI which simply makes a beeline for the player (like the cops in Driver on the PS1) and the slightly glitchy score system that encourages you to rub up against opponents more than ram them at speed. It's pretty fun and each derby might last about 5 minutes until your car blows up, but there aren't very many of them. The Speed and Splatout events are decent too, Speed basically being normal races with proper racetracks and formula-style cars; and Splatout being a zombies mode where you drive around the regular circuits trying to run over as many people as possible, and as these use Race, Speed and Derby maps there are a lot of them to work through. The maps range from pretty decent in design, maybe a 6/10, to redefining the word pain (looking at you, Tatras Mountains), but you can't deny there's plenty of variety throughout your playthrough. I'm not sure I'd have paid full price for this, but get it on sale and there's a good 3 or 4 hours of fun to be had.

Flat out 3. Now this is what I am talking about. This game is legendary. I love how there is no wasd and the quality when you first play is the lowest that it can be. Cool math games quality is better than loading into this. But apart from that it was really good. GOTY 100% 10/10!

tl;dr Get it on sale for less than a dollar if you want to experience the definition of mediocrity. In my quest to get all achievements in my library this was next on my list. Finished in roughly 11 hours, and for a good hour or so was looking up how to beat some of the stuntman tracks. Apparently there is a control mechanic that is never explained or shown on screen for less than a milisecond. Turns out you can hit the eject key and get a jump mid air, imagine that. This kind of constant trying to figure out stuff as I progressed was so annoying. I can tell that no testing went into seeing if everything can be completed. Example, there is a challenge where you have to drive a bus through the race track. Except the bus is so slow that a required jump in the track is impassable. So instead of driving the track like normal, you back track through the level to hit the required checkpoint, then drive back to the jump the other way around. The race is 3 laps so this took forever. So as far as the gameplay goes. Its about what I expected from Flatout, except that quantity over quality doesn't work with the Flatout formula. The physics in this game are shit, that doesn't work well when the game is known for good crash physics. I can plainly see this is a rushed shovelware game that left when it was deep in a beta state. Because who the crap decided that the tracks should be repeated about 5 times for "different event types". This got so repetitive and boring. Definition of milking what you have. Onto some more random notes I have. IF you intend on actually playing this game. DO THE CHALLENGES FIRST. 50 challenges that give you a preselected car and track setup. This helps alot when unlocking stuff because its a required mode to get all the achivements, and it gets you familiar with the tracks. The only good thing I can say is there are some funky options that allow you to make the game way faster to beat. Use the Alarma Special car. Its the best car for handling. Some challenges and tracks require the speed to be set faster or classic rather than Default. This alludes to some of the options that can be set before you enter a race. There is a setting that can set how fast the gameplay/cars are. Yeah some fiddling was required in order to make it through some of the events. Another bug, sometimes the AI can glitch and do an entire race with boost making it unwinnable, usually you can fix it by restarting the race. The AI will boost for a little when the race starts but I had about 40 times where the AIs boost never ran out so they just flew by never to be seen again. The physics suck but some computers may benefit from disabling the multithreaded physics option in the menu. Apparently my computer is so beefy that the physics can break from how fast the physics calculations are handled. There is a setting in the options at the bottom to force the physics to run on a single core/thread only. Overall 3/10 Almost felt like playing Solitare, something so boring and mindless it sucks everything away until you realize you paid money to play this. Unless you happened to get this game with the Flatout bundle, which I hope is the only way this game makes it into peoples library.

I didnt how this bad game was and gave it a try and i didnt enjoy it and it felt like a bad mobile game, then I checked the reviews and found out the lore. Totally not recommended.

from what i played,this is not entirely awful(though my tastes are weird) it DEFINITELY HAS MAJOR ISSUES,but i find games with issues fun,i can break em

This game isn't even so shit that it's funny like I thought it'd be, it's just frustrating and just feels unfun

This is not even that type of game that makes you say "its so bad its good" this is plain bad and boring.

The Game is so bad, I had to permanently remove it from my library without a refund. There's no reason for me to say how bad it is, everyone knows already.

It's not the premise that works against Flatout 3 being a good game, it's the implementation. Terribly weak AI and amorphous car control distract from what could have been an enjoyable vehicular riot.