FlatOut 4: Total Insanity Review — A Competent Racer With a Genuinely Odd Stunt Mode

FlatOut 4: Total Insanity arrived in 2017 as the fourth game in the FlatOut series and the first one Kylotonn Games built. Bigben Interactive and Strategy First published it for PlayStation 4, PC, and Xbox One. It holds a 6.6 out of 10 from six outlets on the IGDB critic aggregate. That number is fair, and the reasons are easy to name: the game does what it advertises, and almost nothing beyond it.

Trailer, via PQube.

Kylotonn Games Inherits a Franchise

The series changed hands for this entry, with Tiny Rebel Games also credited on development. That matters, because the earlier FlatOut games built their following on a specific promise: speed that feels out of control, damage that looks like it hurts, and a physics engine that turns every crash into a small comedy. FlatOut 4 keeps that promise on paper. It advertises muscle cars, race cars, trucks, and a rocket boosted ice cream van. That last vehicle tells you the tone the developers wanted. Silly, fast, a little unhinged.

The modes back it up. FlatOut 4: Total Insanity runs on two gameplay options: stunt and race. Racing is what you expect. You drive against bots, or against other people in multiplayer. The stunt mode is where the series has always been strangest, and it stays strange here. You eject the driver from the car and use the body as the projectile. In the stoneskipping mode, you launch the driver and try to skip them as far as possible across a pool. It is a dumb idea executed with real commitment, and it is the closest the game gets to the old FlatOut spirit.

Stoneskipping Carries the Stunt Mode

The stunt mode also carries a party option. Players in the same room compete for the most points. That is a local multiplayer hook, and it is the kind of thing that used to justify a racing game’s existence in a living room. FlatOut 4: Total Insanity supports split screen as well as online play, and it offers single player. The modes list is generous. First person, third person, and a bird’s-eye or isometric view are all available, which is more camera flexibility than most racers bother with.

So the feature list is full. The question is whether the parts cohere, and they do not fully. The racing and the stunts feel like two different games sharing a disc. One wants to be a serious arcade racer. The other wants to be a physics toy. FlatOut 4: Total Insanity never decides which one it is, and the result is a game that is good at several things and great at none.

The Rocket Boosted Ice Cream Van

Here is the thing about that ice cream van. It is a promise about the game’s personality. A vehicle like that tells the player the physics are loose, the stakes are low, and the fun comes from absurdity. FlatOut 4: Total Insanity delivers the van. It does not always deliver the absurdity. The destruction is present, the speed is present, but the tracks and the racing do not build toward the kind of wild, out-of-control moments the marketing describes. The game says death-defying. It plays closer to competent.

That gap is the whole review in miniature. FlatOut 4: Total Insanity is a return to the franchise’s arcade destruction roots, as the developers put it, and the roots are visible. They are just not deep. The stunt events are the proof. Ejecting a driver into a pool to skip them across the water is exactly the kind of mechanic that should make this game memorable. It is memorable. It is also thin. Once you have skipped a driver a few times, the mode has shown you everything it has.

A 6.6 From Six Outlets

The mixed reviews make sense against that. A 6.6 out of 10 from six outlets is not a failure and not a triumph. It is the score of a game that does what it says and not much more. FlatOut 4: Total Insanity is the fourth entry in a series that once stood for something specific, and this entry stands for that thing at a lower intensity. It is playable. It is occasionally funny. It does not move the series forward.

The platform spread is worth noting. PlayStation 4, PC, and Xbox One all got the game, so no one was left out. That is a wide release for a mid-budget racer, and it suggests the publishers expected the FlatOut name to carry weight on its own. The name does carry some. Fans of the earlier games will find the destruction they came for. They will also find a game that feels like it is going through the motions in the racing events while saving its personality for the stunt mode.

Ejecting the Driver Is the Whole Idea

The stunt mode is the part worth defending. Ejecting the driver is a mechanic no other racing game of this size bothers with, and the stoneskipping variant turns it into a scoring game with a clear goal. Skip the driver as far as possible. That is a legible objective, and the party option gives it a social layer. In a room full of people, FlatOut 4: Total Insanity has a reason to exist. Split screen supports that, and online multiplayer extends it.

The vehicle range supports it too. Muscle cars, race cars, trucks, and the ice cream van give the game a broad toy box. The camera options let you watch the chaos from the angle you prefer, including a bird’s-eye view that makes the crashes easier to read. These are small decisions that add up to a game that respects the player’s time. It just does not surprise them.

FlatOut 4: Total Insanity is a 6.6 out of 10. The game is a competent arcade racer with a genuinely odd stunt mode bolted to the side. The racing works. The stunts work. The two halves do not lift each other up, and the series’ identity gets diluted in the process. Kylotonn Games made a FlatOut game that looks and sounds like FlatOut without quite feeling like it.

The stunt mode is the only place where FlatOut 4: Total Insanity takes a real swing. Everything else is safe, and safe is not what this series was built on. The ice cream van is in the game. The insanity is mostly in the marketing.

FlatOut 4: Total Insanity — 6.6 of 10

The Numbers

• Title: FlatOut 4: Total Insanity (stylized as FL4TOUT TOTAL INSANITY)
• Year: 2017
• Developers: Kylotonn Games, Tiny Rebel Games
• Publishers: Bigben Interactive, Strategy First
• Platforms: PlayStation 4, PC (Microsoft Windows), Xbox One
• Genre: Racing
• Modes: Single player, multiplayer, split screen
• Perspectives: First person, third person, bird’s-eye/isometric
• Published critical score: 6.6/10 (IGDB critic aggregate, 6 outlets)

arcade racer · FlatOut 4 · game review · Kylotonn Games · PS4 · racing games