FlatOut 2

interest and difficult 10/10

Flatout 2 is what happens when you have a really good idea and do too much with it. Like by all accounts, it has everything Flatout 1 has, but almost takes it overboard. The sense of speed is far greater in the game but it comes at a massive cost of weightiness. Now every car feels light as a feather and almost like it's hovering over the road, you don't have nearly as much of a connection with the car as you had in the original game. The mini games make a return but there is way, way more of them and the majority of them are incredibly unfun and completely luck/ repetition based with not much skill required. In order to get a high score/ gold on pretty much any one of the mini games, you are going to need to start holding then release a button at a very specific time while driving down a very specific route and sometimes driving a very specific car and pressing a button at a very specific time while airborne. There are so many factors that go into it that the trial and error approach feels more like banging your head against a wall than it does overcoming any kind of skill challenge. Destruction is turned up to 11, especially environmentally, but more often than not this just turns road conditions into an incredibly unpredictable and volatile environment. Flatout 2 is the kind of game where a singular fencepost can send you barrel rolling 20 ft in the air after hitting it, and it's also the kind of game where there will be 50 fenceposts littering the track by lap 2. The one saving grace is this affects the AI as well, but it never feels fun when you get sent from 1st to the back of the pack on the last lap because one of the many unavoidable pieces of litter on the road decided to turn you into a fighter jet. At the end of the day though, the car selection is amped up and you have so many different feeling options, the upgrade system makes noticable changes and is actually satisfying to fully upgrade a car you enjoy, the new street maps are tons of fun, the soundtrack is absolutely banging and has a surprising amount of big name bands such as Metallica, Rob Zombie and Goldfinger in it and at it's core it is still Flatout, so it feels far different than most racing games on the market. I just wouldn't recommend it over Flatout 1.