Review: Flatout: Head On

Racing/Stunts/Demolition Derby

Take your PSP on the special bus.

Mark

The PSP has had a bit of a mini renaissance this year with first Patapon and then God of War: Chains of Olympus and such (potential) treats as Final Fantasy VII: Crisis Core and Elder Scrolls Travels: Oblivion still to come. So is this one of the new wave of games that has started to elevate the PSP from shovelware hell or is it just another racer to add to the handheld bargain bin like Driver, Full Auto and Juiced? Well I’m sad to say the latter, so before I start putting the boot in let’s start at the beginning with a quick history lesson.

Sketchy Controls meet Ridiculous Physics.

Flatout: Head On is a port of Flatout: Ultimate Carnage which was itself an updated port of Flatout 2 (With me so far?) done for the Xbox 360 and released last year and now residing in your local 2 for £20 bargain bin. So what’s been cut to fit it on to the PSP? Nothing surprisingly, given the lack of space on a UMD. All the games modes are present both for single player and multiplayer events and all the licensed music here to listen to. The three main modes here are Carnage, Flatout and Single Event with each having its own rules and style of play.

Carnage mode is thirty individual events where you have to win a race or complete a certain stunt mode to get a score. Depending on that score you are then awarded either a gold, silver or bronze rating with more events being unlocked as you reach certain score targets. The shortness of these events makes them perfect for a quick five minute play on the bus although some of the stunt events rely more on luck than skill for beating the score targets and a few are horribly bugged such as the bowling game where the pins act like they’ve been soaked in silly juice.

This is exactly what Johnny Cash was singing about.

Flatout mode is what can be easily described as ‘career’ mode with you starting out with a single unmodified shitbox car to race one of three modes: Derby, Race or Street to make money and win cups and unlock new vehicles to buy with your winnings. Along with buying whole new cars you can modify any car you have in your garage with new engines, tyres, brakes etc. but the effect of such mods is minimum and often you’re better of just saving your money and buying a whole new car than trying to polish a four-wheeled turd.

Last of all are the Single events where you can play any mini game or race any track be it in a straight race or destruction derby. There are also the same options for multiplayer action either through WLAN or in a local party mode. Right that’s enough of the obligatory ‘talk about the game’ stuff, let’s cut the shit and get down to it. Playing this game across the course of the last fortnight I went through three distinct phases of being: depression, anger and then finally pity. Let me explain.

Quick! Save her before Elton John releases a fucking tribute single!

Flatout on the 360 was a game I never really got on with, the single player game frustrated me with its cheap AI, stingy unlockables and overweight physics engine. I played the multiplayer along with everyone else but never suggested “oh lets play Flatout” and actively tried to turn people away from it in favour of (in my option) better games but unfortunately for me a few of the hardcore Peowwdophiles (We prefer the term Peowwsters, artificial or otherwise – Ed) had a hard on for the stunt events so it took up valuable time we could have been playing something else.

Playing Head On for the first time depressed me, knowing I had committed to reviewing this game I would once again take up valuable free time I could have been playing other far better games and sure enough the more I played the more obvious it was this was even worse than its 360 big brother.

By the end of the first week my depression had turned to outright hostility and anger. Why was I putting myself through playing this piece if shit again! Why does every car handle like a drunken giraffe covered in KY Jelly! Why does the AI always recover from any slams in 0.2 seconds!

Rich Secondary Review Mark called it right with ‘shovelware’. The curse of any handheld is when devs run out of new ideas and start porting games that just aren’t appropriate for the system (ie – anything 3D on the DS). Certainly I enjoyed Flatout on the 360 a lot more than Mark did but even with a decent analogue stick, hi-def graphics and a solid framerate the game was fairly punishing. So a straight port onto the PSP was always going to suffer. Still, it does a rather good job of cramming in as much content as possible with most of the modes from the console versions being present and correct so there is decent value for money to be found if you’re prepared to wrestle with the barely unusable controls. With a lot of practise and patience this game may end up appealing but I’ve been struggling for over a week with it and unfortunately the PSP is something of a straightjacket to an otherwise rather mental driving game. Secondary Score: 4/10

Why is it near impossible to steer your car with the d-pad OR the analogue nub! In short every little problem and fault (and they are legion) drove me into a rage, leaving me convinced this game was going to be slaughtered by me come review day. So here I am its review day so let’s slaughter it with my weapon of choice the ‘shitty game machine-gun’ that can fire over two hundred faults a second. Ready… aim… fire!

Appalling handling from every vehicle in every class. Low resolution graphics that look more like a fog bound N64 game than a PSP racer. A draw distance that can be measured using a school ruler. A soundtrack so poor it makes EA Trax sound good by comparison. Driver AI so cheap you could have bum games with Sally Phillips and a kebab and still have change from a quid. A loading and saving bug that will hang up your PSP until you give up waiting and pry the battery out yourself. Jaggies so big and obvious the Titanic could avoid them. Last of all the worst thing is it’s ‘just another driving game’ like all those other games languishing in the bargain bin or on your game shelf knowing you’d only get mere pence of you tried to lash them at your local games emporium.

But doing this to Head On only brings pity not joy. Anyone who likes this kind of game (and there are a few of those mad souls around) will if they have any sense go for the previous 360 version. This isn’t any kind of anti-Sony, pro-M$ bias the 360 version is just plain better while the PSP edition is a watered down to near tastelessness slop of cheap shovelware bollocks. I could put the boot in even more but I won’t because I pity this game as it has zero chance of making an impact on the PSP and will, just like every Flatout game before it end up in the bargain bin before you can say “edgy gen-Y racer with nu metal soundtrack”

Rating:

4/10