Trail Out | Review

Győző "FairyEmpire" Baki2 weeks agoLast Updated: April 17, 2024

0 556 8 minutes read

Fans of FlatOut, it’s your time to shine again. Released a while back on PC, Trail Out is a spiritual sequel of sorts that wants to up the insanity seen in the classic chapters, while throwing a few unique ideas to the mix as well. Now that it’s on Xbox Series consoles (and on PS5 later this year) with various DLCs included from the start, it’s time to smash through the windshield together!

Flattened Out

The legendary FlatOut racing series by Bugbear seems to live on in many forms. While the original Finnish developer of the series has long moved on from the IP, they replicated many of its ideas and perks in various games: first, in a bizarre move, in Ridge Racer: Unbounded, a very odd installment of Namco’s legendary street racing franchise that felt more of a FlatOut game than a proper Ridge Racer, satisfying the fans of the former far more than the fans of the latter.

More importantly, they ended up creating the excellent Wreckfest, which followed through with the racing philosophy of the FlatOut games, while expanding on the roster of driving styles and events. The IP’s current owners have also kept making FlatOut games – first the PC-only and absolutely disastrous FlatOut 3, considered to be one of the worst games on Steam, and then a different developer creating the much more polished, if rather safe FlatOut 4 – Total Insanity, which may not have touched the heights of the classics but it wasn’t far from it either.

But what even sets FlatOut apart from the many racers on the market? It’s heavy, it’s destructive, it’s rough. Dirt roads are predominant, though urban areas, closed-off circuits and ice/snow areas exist too – but the racing feel is always the same, and is always about having cars that feel heavy, somewhat hard to muscle around through the bumpy surfaces, with the bouncing of the suspensions largely felt even in what would normally be extremely easy corners in most arcade racers.

It’s no simulation, but the player must be wary of entering corners at adequate speeds and angles, as a bad bump or crash can undo the entire race. Much of this is down to the excellent damage model, which bends, breaks or sends away entire segments of the car in realistic fashion, with even the tyres themselves that can start feeling loose or get lost altogether in the process.

With tracks littered with destructible items that then remain there lap after lap, players can gain nitro boosts by hitting these objects, but smash them too hard or at the wrong angle and the car can flip, as a rogue cone or tyre barrier’s piece can end under our wheels and make us flip and crash like a maniac. Drivers can even fly through the windshield (seatbelt, what’s that?), a quirky mechanic that is even used for various funny minigames such as bowling or curling.

This level of destruction, naturally, makes for very bumpy and dirty racing between the drivers, but there’s a huge level of risk involved given the disastrous outcome that can come out from a wrong nudge. Chaotic racing, but with a brain. That’s how I’d sum up FlatOut.

FlatOut at home

Trail Out aims to do quite exactly that. In fact, it could almost pass off as a FlatOut recreation of sorts in many times, with the car styles, locales, handling, and even various UI elements perhaps even too closely mimicking the legendary titles by Bugbear, offering a sort of compilation of things we could do in FlatOut, FlatOut 2 and FlatOut: Ultimate Carnage.

I would say that it feels a bit cheaper in many ways, with the developers clearly not having the budget to make a game as technologically advanced as those titles were compared to their competition. The handling feels a tiny bit less refined, though coherent and enjoyable, the track design feels a little less elegant, and visuals in general feel uneven and messy at times.

Even the AI seems to range from being way too easy on the standard difficulty and, sometimes, too hard on the alternative one, making for an uneven level of challenge as the player progresses through the many events. But underneath it all, it still manages to bring that smart, yet chaotic racing that shined through in the classic FlatOut games – and then attempts to go beyond.

One thing Bugbear’s iconic titles never had was a good single player progression. Sure, people can feel nostalgia for the cups of the first game, but there never has actually been a proper story or anything more than winning races and cups and moving on onto the next one, all while finding the funds to buy and upgrade better and better cars, going from dirty scraps to shiny sportscars.

Trail Out throws an actual story into the mix, putting us in the shoes of a former stuntman named Mihalych, retired after a terrible accident he can barely recall, but excited of getting back to danger after he sees an ad for the Trail Out festival – oh hey, that’s the name of the game. After beating a few other clearly less skilled candidates, via an event the game uses to teach us some of the very basics of the game’s driving, our newcomer is naturally ranked as the lowest of the 8 drivers competing.

By winning events, he can then gain cash and fans, using the money to buy new cars and upgrade them to the max, whereas the fans are needed to progress to more advanced events and, when a threshold is met, allow us to go head-to-head with the driver above us in the ranking in a special two-event showdown. Beating them allows us to climb in the ranking and unlock further vehicles and features, and it goes and goes until we can finally challenge the leader for a chance to be the champion.

Scraping metal

It’s a quite simple formula, though it certainly feels more cohesive and impactful than the generic barely connected races found in most racers nowadays. It’s all made more intriguing by the presence of actual, fully (if badly) voiced cutscenes, with our protagonist finding various bizarre allies, having rivalries with other racers and so on. Not gonna enter spoiler territory, but the game does eventually start to tackle Mihalych slowly unravelling the backgrounds of his incident as well, with some interesting if predictable revelations throughout the way.

It’s certainly not a story worthy of Codemasters’ latest story modes in recent GRID and F1 games, but it’s a good incentive to push on with what would otherwise just be a generic sequence of races against the same 7 opponents, with just the game modes, tracks and vehicles changing every time.

The actual events have a decent range in variety, usually taking cues from the already billion times mentioned FlatOut classics. Regular races, destruction derbies, minigames involving throwing our driver out of the windshield, elimination races where the worst placed racer is destroyed every 30 seconds or so. Various events even have special rule, like a weird race where the player has to use a go-kart against everyone else having heavy roadcars, or destruction derbies where the player is effectively outnumbered against a larger number of foes.

Even the FlatOut-style minigames are back, from a slightly revised version of bowling, to an Angry Birds-esque destruction fest and then some. All in all, the variety is sound, and having to manage the damage levels of our car and our opponents’ as well (once destoyed, the racer is out) means that most races gerate their own little metanarrative.

Between campaign events, the player can spend time in their hub, where they can collect wrecked cars and make them raceable again via fixes and upgrades. This is then used to build a whopping garage of up to 80 vehicles, ranging from streetcars, utilities, go-karts, trucks, even tanks and other highly amusing machine choices.

There’s a very mild visual customization via a handful of pre-made paint jobs and customizable license plates, but just as the upgrade system, even visuals tend to boil down to a handful of options, rather than something expansive like we’d find in Forza games for example. Here, players can also accept challenges to gain more money, do short livestreams to earn fans, or even buy cosmetic skins to change Mihalych’s appearance. Perhaps the most important aspect of all, is understanding what the next even will be, as players can switch between different kinds of vehicles and tyres, specialized for certain styles and courses.

That car needs some polish

If the player’s ever stuck due to insufficient funds, a difficulty spike or simply wants to play something other than the next available races in the story, they can always hop onto Free Race, where they can freely choose one of the 50+ tracks, the similarly many vehicles and combine them as they see fit. Here, the variety is even higher than the story alone would imply.

There’s rollercoaster-esque tracks with height changes all around, a funny recreation of the Nürburgring track, but even marathon-length events in the mountains and beyond. Similarly, the wackiness of the available vehicles reaches quite crazy heights. Notable examples would be a knock-off James Bond vehicle with even a functioning machine gun on board, or a tank that can, too, shoot. I also love the towing truck, that can latch to opponents and carry them around, only to smash them into a sharp corner or something equally funny.

Trail Out does not seem to care much about offering balanced races, about making sure that every vehicle can beat another or to give weaknesses to vehicles that seem too strong. The player can use virtually anything in any event, even using said towing truck against a boss in a city car if they so desire. It’s all about being fun and destructive, with the player determining where they want to draw the line.

As briefly mentioned before, the game does lack a bit of polish across the board. While the amount and variety of content is impressive, not every track feels as well made as the others, with various comical vehicles seeming unfit for entire areas, rendering them virtually unplayable at times. The handling too, while satisfying, seems to lack the finesse of the FlatOut games that Trail Out is trying so hard to emulate.

And while the graphics are definitely below average for today’s standards, in some chaotic moments with tons of destruction, explosions and debris the framerate can tank even on Xbox Series X, where I tested the game. Oddly enough, these sharp drops in performance seem… constant, in that when the frames drop down to the 20-30s from the 60 they seem to stay there in a fixed manner, until something magically snaps and everything is back to a smooth run again. It can be annoying and jarring at times, but it never once made me lose a race or anything, so I could live with it. Multiplayer is unfortunately limited to local play, with no online modes currently available.

Last but not least, another one of the FlatOut textbook, but the soundtrack is full of blasting hard rock, heavy metal, nu-metal and metalcore bands by mainly fairly underground names, though a few will be known to those who follow the scene a little – at the very least the band Halocene.

Did I mention FlatOut yet?

Trail Out is, by all means, a massive love letter to the classic FlatOut games by Bugbear – to a point that it almost feels like a massive fan-made mod. Many elements of that game are, in fact, recreated almost 1:1, though with slightly less polish and finesse as the Finnish developers did at the time. But as good and expansive mods tend to do, there’s so much more added to the mix: a surprisingly enjoyable story mode, tons of funky vehicles, and an even larger variety of game modes.

A distinct lack of it’s own identity, a bit of jank, some uneven performance and a lack of online multiplayer perhaps doesn’t make it into an essential buy, but if you’re nostalgic for FlatOut games, or just the arcade racer attitude of the 00’s and are able to put up with some of the jank, you will surely have a lovely time in Trail Out.