Flashout 3D is an anti-gravity racing game released back in 2012. To celebrate the release of Flashout III, the developers Jujubee S.A. decided to remaster it and give it for free. They improved graphics and physics, while the content and gameplay remained the same as in the original title. The original title was released on mobile devices and PCs, while the remaster is only available on PCs.
*Note: Since I haven't played the original release I'll not be able to compare it and say if they improved what was mentioned, but I can only give a review of the game in its current state.
To be honest, I never played an anti-gravity racing game and I didn't know what to expect from this genre.
This game is mainly focused on the singleplayer, there is no multiplayer mode in it and after finishing the career mode, that's all to expect from this game. The game offers 6 vehicles, 7 tracks and 7 tournaments in the career mode. After completing it, you're left with either racing against AI opponents with adjustable difficulty or trying to achieve the fastest time possible in time trial mode. The ships cannot be customised, which in my opinion, should've been implemented, you can only upgrade them. Those upgrades don't change the stats of the ship, instead, they are boosters that can be of great use at the beginning of the race.
Several boosters can be collected while racing: weapons (machine guns and rockets), shields, energy, autopilot and nitro. You can only use one weapon at a time, shields and energy (which is practically health) activate upon collecting them and autopilot and nitro are manually activated. Autopilot takes control of your vehicle and drives it for a limited time and in my opinion, it's completely useless. I highly recommend you not to use it at all, as the autopilot drives like the AI would drive, probably even worse. Several times I ended up colliding with mines (located around the map, they often take up almost half of your maximum energy(health)), as I couldn't do anything since I couldn't take control back.
As I mentioned in the note, I don't know how the game was before the remastered version, but what I noticed is that the developers stated that they improved the ship's physics. I'm not sure if that's true since the biggest problem in the ship's physics is jumping. What happens when you jump is that on several tracks your ship ends up outside the map and you have to either quickly shift it toward the track or you will end up out of bounds and you'll be respawned (I will soon say what's the problem with respawning). If you somehow successfully jumped, it's not over yet, as when you touch the ground the ship can suddenly snap out, randomly turning in one direction, probably into a wall, slowing you down.
The respawning is also a big problem, as after you lose all of your energy (either by colliding into walls or being damaged by opponent AI or by going off track), you have to respawn, the respawning itself takes several seconds and from the first place you end up last, just like that. Somehow the opponents that had to respawn before ended up catching me without any problem and while I couldn't confirm it, I think that the penalty for respawning isn't the same for the opponents as for me.
Graphically the game is improved, obviously and it gave me the vibe of the seventh generation (I don't want to say that the Enhanced Edition looks bad, but that the color palette and effects remind me of some games for the 7th generation of consoles), so I started to wonder why this game wasn't released on PS3 as the graphics match perfectly and I haven't found one, probably the Jujubee S.A. was much smaller at that time and they couldn't afford to port the game to consoles. Several tunnels have flashing lights
in their interior that quickly flash with different colors, which can be very irritating for your eyes. I highly advise you to turn off the "Immersive Equalizer" in the settings menu to disable it.
While completing the career mode the difficulty isn't adjustable, it's adjusted automatically according to the tournament you're driving.
All in all a decent anti-gravity racing game that unfortunately doesn't offer much content, providing us with just a few hours of gameplay content. It doesn't have multiplayer and the ship's physics still needs to be improved. To sum up, even with all these cons, I still enjoyed this game, it isn't perfect, but it's a decent introduction for those who haven't tried an anti-gravity racing game before. 6/10
