FlatOut 2
The name says it all, folks, this game rocks.
Published: August 1, 2006
Speaking of the AI, it tries to be novel, introducing a handful of personalities with characters seemingly lifted from the pages of Entertainment Weekly or People, offering approximations of a Jessica Simpson or Jude Law or a Paul Walker, but in practice they rarely feel distinct. You'll see most of the personalities come out in the destruction derby races, where some drivers retreat or play the outside for half of the competition, but during the races, it seems most of the attention shone on individual personalities is lost.
If there is one area of the game that's utterly uncompromising, it's the visuals. Bugbear's engine is remarkably adept at rendering a perfectly fine variety of different environments, offering lakeside sprints, aqueduct dashes, suburban streets, downtown battles and so on, and often one will give way to another in the course of a track. Furthermore, most of the tracks have multiple routes that are closed off, and are littered with shortcuts (though in later races these sort of become the "right" path anyway).
All this comes into play when seeing the sheer amount of stuff that can be broken and scattered all over the road, because the tracks already look strikingly good when you start, and slowly degrade with each lap. It's the cars, however, that show the most wear and tear, and it is indeed beautiful. It's more than just textures changing; bumpers will sag and then finally slough off, doors and hoods will crumple and then break free, tires wobble, the entire chassis will crumple and deform. This happens on every car, and through it all, the engine maintains a rock-solid 60 frames. It's very, very impressive stuff, and shows that the PS2 still has a little life left in it.
Earlier I mentioned the Burnout influence in the way racers bump and grind, but it seems to have bled into the soundtrack too. As if trying to ape EA Traxx, Nickelback, Fall Out Boy, Alkaline Trio and even one Mr. Rob Zombie were all injected into the game. Hell, there's even a Rise Against song that appeared in Burnout 3. Obviously, your mileage with this kind of music will vary, of course, and you can always turn it off (which will probably happen at some point since the 25 or so tracks are looped pretty regularly), but you can turn on and off individual tracks if you'd like, and there's the nice touch of adding a ton of reverb to the tracks during the mini-games. The downside here is that the song selection is even more stunted, and actually plays from the same section of a song every time.
All the engine sounds are wonderfully throaty and meaty, though. The higher-end cars sound like, well, Street Racers, while the earlier pre-banged up derby racers are more about rasp. It's a nice aural slurry, and stuff like tire squeals or dirt sliding around is all represented with a strong Dolby Pro-Logic II mix. I also have to congratulate Bugbear for avoiding giving all the racers with their cookie-cutter personalities a ton of stupid dialogue. Hearing the same inane comment as you passed someone or they passed you would have hurt the audio overall, and they wisely chose to keep the racers silent.
FlatOut 2 is one of those games that shows the current-gen systems aren't quite out of pep yet. The engine throws a stupid amount of stuff on the screen, holds a rock-solid framerate, and delivers a sense of speed that few racing games can match. The controls are tight, the tracks varied, and the AI strong enough to provide a challenge without resorting to rubber-banding (at least that I noticed). Each of these things seem like no-brainers, but they rarely come together in a package as strong as FO2 offers.
It's not perfect, mind you; the mini-games can range from hopelessly addictive to try-a-dozen-times-and-never-play-again pointless, but the core of the game, the racing and the improvements made to it over the last game are admirable. Sure, the two games are remarkably alike, but they're also quite unique in the level of destruction they offer. And when something ain't broke... well, you know the rest.
