PC Roundup Review

FlatOut: Ultimate Carnage

• Publisher: Empire
• Developer: Bugbear Entertainment
• Genre: Racing

FlatOut racing has no rules. It's just floor-the-accelerator and do what you must to win. The tracks consist mostly of straights and gentle corners you can fly down, although there are some tighter bends it's necessary to brake for and power-slide around, so the game isn't a complete blundering no-skill affair.

If you've not experienced it before, FlatOut is a destruction-based racer. Smashing into obstacles and other drivers, as well as catching air off big ramps, fills your nitro boost meter up. This means even on those tighter turns, you can batter your way around on other cars, as the time lost in the bumping and scraping is made up for by the turbo boost you'll bag and use on the next straight.

As a result, the races in the career mode are pretty wild. Be prepared for T-boned cars, bonnets and doors flying everywhere, ripped up chain-link fences and smashed shop windows (one track has you driving through the plate glass windows of a shopping mall). It's total carnage, and some of the huge pile-ups that occur on a lap-by-lap basis are fabulously chaotic, not to mention lusciously rendered with some excellent damage modelling.

Although this maximum wreckage policy does have its drawbacks. It plays merry hell with your insurance for starters (just how many points do you get for driving through a shopping centre?) and the savage AI opposition can prove more than a handful. Quite often you'll be tootling along quite happily nudging up towards the podium places, and some bugger behind you will use their nitro boost and come flying up, bumping and spinning you out. Then you'll be hit by someone else while you're trying to get back onto the track. On the one hand, it's kind of cool that the AI drivers are as malevolent as any human would be, but on the other it's bloody annoying to be suddenly blindsided and effectively out of the race with nothing you could realistically have done about it.

Forget congestion charges. Spontaneously combusting cars are a more effective inner city traffic solution.

The lack of variety in the vehicles is a slight concern, too. There's a choice between faster sports cars and more durable pick-up trucks, but to be honest there isn't a huge deal of difference no matter what you drive. Although FlatOut can't be accused of lacking diversity in the events it throws at the player.

Even the straightforward races are run through a wide range of environments, with novelty shortcuts aplenty, and there are also time trials, destruction derbies, plus challenges where you've got to reach checkpoints before a timer bomb ticks down and the car explodes. On top of that, there's also a range of stunt mini-games which involve craziness such as launching your driver through the windscreen to knock down pins in a large-scale version of ten-pin bowling that'd make Tufty spin in his pet cemetery.

Overall, it's a very entertaining low-tech drive and demolish racer, but with one caveat for veterans of the series - they'll have seen much of the game already in FlatOut 2. Sure, some content has been added to the single-player, although the multiplayer has been beefed up more with online racing provided courtesy of Games For Windows Live. The visuals are far more polished, and upping the amount of cars in a race from eight to twelve has certainly increased FlatOut's carnage factor (to an ultimate level, no less). Whether that's enough to warrant a purchase is a judgement call, and a thin one to which we'll give a marginal nod.

7/10

Code of Honor: The French Foreign Legion

• Publisher: City Interactive
• Developer: City Interactive
• Genre: First-Person Shooter

Civil war has broken out on the Ivory Coast, and the insurgents have managed to get hold of radioactive waste that could conceivably be used to construct a dirty bomb. This obviously isn't good, so an international task force has been dispatched, the spearhead of which is the French foreign legion. Although in this first-person shooter, the legion mostly consists of one bloke - Claude Boulet. That's you, that is.

Occasionally you get a partner, or help from an airstrike, but mostly it's all about a single soldier playing Rambo with a variety of shotguns, automatic and sniper rifles, and the big artillery of grenade and rocket launchers. Also some C5 explosives come in handy, as you're constantly blowing up big things like planes and tanks.

Unfortunately, the game isn't nearly as average as it sounds. Code of Honor has rather handicapped the opposition forces in so much as the programmers have forgotten to insert their brains. Whether you're on easy or hard mode (there's no medium here, compromise fans), it's a snap to slice through the rebels with casual ease. Many of them just stand there and wait for you to shoot them, which is very polite, but ultimately not all that satisfying.

Don't aim for the head. There's nothing vital in there, trust me.

Some run back and forth between two set points and actually fire at you (the gall of it). But the majority are fond of the stationary battle pose. The vehicles aren't much better. True enough, an armoured car's machine gun will rake some serious damage, but if you run in it's possible to crouch next to the APC. Then it can't hit you, it won't move, and you can just roll a grenade or two under, back away and watch it get decimated. Never mind the French, the Falklands Foreign Legion could handle this lot.

Chronically poor AI and a lack of challenge aren't the only problems Code of Honor suffers from. The levels are highly linear and feel artificial, with areas boxed in by fences, barbed wire and impenetrable bushes. There's generally only one way to go, and you're even channelled around in open areas by impassable hazards like minefields.

The graphics are rather ropey too, particularly the animation of the soldiers, and bugs such as men dying suspended in mid-air. I could go into further minor irritations, such as the sniper rifle sights being so lightly drawn that they're practically invisible against any sort of dark background. Suffice it to say that even considering its low budget price tag, this is a plodding and well below average shooter.

3/10

Overspeed: High Performance Street Racing

• Publisher: City Interactive
• Developer: City Interactive
• Genre: Racing

The illegal street-racing scene is flourishing in Los Angeles, apparently. Luckily, nobody drives around the streets of the city at night, and the highways are completely devoid of any vehicles, so there's no oncoming traffic to dodge in and out of. It's just you and an opponent duelling in your pimped up rides; lowered suspensions, nitrous oxide, neon lights, the works.

I see a yellow car and I want it painted black.

And visually at least, the cars look okay. It's a shame they don't handle that well. They feel light and lack solidity, plus judging braking is difficult simply because you don't have any real sense of how fast you're going. Not that it matters much because half the time you can batter your way around a corner by ploughing into the crash barriers and then turning.

Overspeed's racing realism is further hampered by the computer AI. It's obviously been designed to avoid robotic opponents who never make mistakes, but it's gone too far the other way. The CPU drivers make ridiculous random errors at regular intervals, particularly if you're behind (possibly as some manner of catch-up mechanism).

The tracks themselves are severely limited in terms of imagination and numbers. In the first quarter of the game, to rise up through the rankings and win turbochargers, spoilers and other stat-boosting paraphernalia, you'll race just two courses over and over and over. To make matters worse, one of these is basically a small square. After repeatedly whizzing around them thirty times plus you'll end up more bored than the bottom of the North Sea.

Anyone still reading? I'll moan about the bugs then. Sometimes when turning a corner in the first-person view, the driver's hands spin madly around the steering wheel like he's having an epileptic fit (maybe this is what happens to the AI drivers when they career off at a daft angle). Fit a nitrous oxide canister and the vehicle's handling goes up by 8 per cent. Why? I've not got a clue. It doesn't make much sense though, if it isn't a bug.

In conclusion: "Doctor, doctor, I think I'm an indicator. And the police keep arresting me!" "Why?" "I can't stop flashing."

Overspeed's a joke. And a bad one at that.

3/10

Sniper: Art of Victory

• Publisher: City Interactive
• Developer: City Interactive
• Genre: First-Person Shooter

Sniper has been produced using the same engine as Code of Honor, or it certainly seems that way. In all fairness, the World War II environments do look a bit more polished, but the telltale signs such as dead soldiers frozen in mid-air are here. Not to mention troops that stand around dumbstruck when under fire.

The difference with Sniper is that you're supposed to be picking people off from long range, so often your victims should be standing still as you bull's-eye them in the forehead (a fortunate coincidence indeed). It is possible to pick up and use a sub-machinegun, but close quarters combat is definitely discouraged as these guns come with a mere handful of ammo. And the Germans tend to tear you to shreds before you can blink at short range.

The central sniping mechanic works fairly well. The rifle's telescopic sight undulates slightly with your breathing, although with the press of a key you can hold your breath for a second or two, so it's all about lining up and timing the shot. The wind gauge is also a factor that needs to be taken into account, so if a gust picks up as you're about to loose, swift compensation is necessary.

You'll spend most of the game hidden and cowering in a variety of not very exotic locations.

On veteran difficulty this is a matter of guesswork, but on the recruit level the game kindly displays a moving dot showing where your true aim actually lies. This feels a bit cheesy, although it did help to confirm my suspicions that clipping errors play a part in missed shots. When firing with a clearly lined up perfect bead on an enemy the bullet sometimes passed straight through them without hitting. Of course, on the harder difficulty you'll never know for sure whether it was the wind or a programming error, which is a tad annoying.

As with Code of Honor, the levels consist of boxed-in mazes with one linear route through them. Even though you're wandering through the ruins of a war-torn city with gunfire and explosions erupting in the background, the place seems empty, with only a few enemy snipers scattered about, and perhaps a couple of friendly troops stood still like exhibits from Madame Tussauds.

While Sniper: Art of Victory is superior to its brother in arms, and the sniping mechanic itself is reasonably well implemented, there are still too many flaws here to recommend it.

4/10

Beauty Factory

• Publisher: City Interactive
• Developer: City Interactive
• Genre: Management Sim

Ever dreamed of making your very own perfume or lipstick? Me neither, but at least Beauty Factory's premise is original. I don't know of any other cosmetics-based management game (though having typed that there's bound to be one out there somewhere). Unfortunately, a beauty of a game it isn't. In fact if beauty is in the eye of the beer holder, as the old joke goes, this game would be a ten-plus pinter with a double-bag safety net.

For starters it's far too simple. I finished the main career on my first attempt, taking just over an hour to do so. Okay, so it's obviously aimed at the younger end of the teenage girl market and isn't supposed to be particularly challenging, but still. There really is nothing to it, and even the target audience is going to end up bored stupid.

Science. It's all about muppets playing with beakers.

Running your factory takes just a few largely brainless clicks per turn. All you've got to do is make sure that you're producing enough stock to keep up with demand, and hit a marketing campaign button every now and then. The other side of the game is the design of the beauty products themselves, a process that's identical whether you're working on a perfume, mascara or eyeliner.

This involves three categories (for perfume it's flower, tree and fruit smells) that have to be mixed in the correct proportion. You're told roughly what two of the levels should be, but have to guess the third, and fine-tune the mixture using trial-and-error guesswork. When you've got a good mix, it sells well, although it's dead easy to get a good mix so the whole thing's fairly irrelevant. The really irritating bit is that every five turns or so you have to do this again, as trends change quickly in the fashion world. Hurrah for fickleness!

On the two-hundredth time of mixing a perfume/lipstick/whatever every minute or so (as the turns pass pretty swiftly, what with there being nothing much else to do), Beauty Factory becomes an experience akin to putting your brain through a meat grinder. Granted, there are some extra scenarios which are actually more challenging than the campaign, but that doesn't alter the fact that doing the dishes is a more enticing prospect than spending time with this game in any way, shape or form.

My wife insisted on having a play as she was intrigued by the idea, although after five short minutes she declared, "What the hell's the point of this?" and went back to playing The Sims 2. Which just about sums it all up, really.

2/10