TRAIL OUT - Phoenix FlatOut

Some good games have already faded into oblivion, some - ruined, and some game series have a very unfortunate fate. The unenviable fate of the once beloved FlatOut. After the second part of the series FlatOut was developed not by Bugbear Entertainment, and Team6 Game Studios, which is a mess. The first two parts of FlatOut were arcade races but driving physics in these games required a lot of skill from the player - the cars were too skidding on turns. Team6 Game Studios did not understand this subtlety and developed FlatOut 3 according to their wrong methodology - cars driven like soap bars and physics of objects hinted at the fact that the tracks are made of papier-mâché...

Fortunately, the FlatOut series was "avenged" by returning to it what was once lost.

Another Mikhalych...

Trail Out doesn't differ much from FlatOut, but where the novel is clearly ahead of its ideological mastermind is in the plot: the action revolves around Mikhalych, a native of Minsk. After leaving his homeland, Mikhalych goes to the U.S. in search of a better life. Working as a stuntman, Mikhalych gets injured time and again during filming.

One evening, Mikhalych goes home in his Zaporozhets and hits a sewer manhole. Of course, the car is unable to withstand such a severe test of strength. Mikhalych's car literally falls apart on the move.

Mikhailich himself survives, but there is little joy in it. There is no money, his car is ruined, he just recently came out of the hospital with fractures, and now he has another traffic accident. The grumpy stuntman is left alone with his thoughts and on the way home on foot admits to himself that he is in deep shit. In the tradition of cinematic clichés, Mikhalych suddenly looks up at a billboard he has come across. The brightly colored advertisement was announcing a kind of TRAIL OUT festival, a racing competition for survival, a real fight without rules on wheels. And then Mikhalych realizes that this moment was destined to happen. Mikhalych either wins TRAIL OUT, or this festival will be his last in life... ...The clownery with the screenshots was inserted for a reason. TRAIL OUT is full of references and references. Sometimes very inappropriate references. Did Ryan Gosling play in TRAIL OUT? History is silent.

Yes, TRAIL OUT's storyline isn't exactly star-studded. But the game wasn't meant to be a serious work of art. So already in the splash screen we observe a near-frame parody on "Drive" with Ryan Gosling in the leading role, and in a minute a reference to "Blade Runner". All this time Mikhalych is accompanied by a dog - is it a reference to "I am a legend" - and how did the dog survive a car crash without a single scratch? You will not get an answer to these questions. But TRAIL OUT makes it clear at once that everything that happens on the screen is the developers' joke. Keep that in mind.

Three references at once in the only introductory video. Do you think this will slow the game down a bit? No, it won't.

J-12 Zhenya vouchsafes to help us in buying and tuning cars, and even gratuitously gives Mikhalych $3000 for the first car - a kind, friendly gesture on a grand scale. That's it, you shouldn't put a cross on people, and once upon a time, Zhenka was chasing kids in Urzykstan...

To win TRAIL OUT, Mikhalych will have to defeat eight blacklisted opponents. But for some reason there is no fall Rockport or white and blue BMW M3 GTR in TRAIL OUT. Speaking of cars...

Zaporozhets, Lada Priora, Volga and other masterpieces of the automobile industry at your service

As TRAIL OUT is a Russian-made game, the developers themselves decided to match the spirit of their homeland. TRAIL OUT is like Atomic Heart from the world of arcade racing simulators: the sense of humor, the spirit of both works, how both of these games feel - the hand of the Russian developer can be felt in everything. If anything, we warned you.

In the game Michalych will not race any foreign cars like the notorious Audi, Mercedes or BMW, but the best cars. On cars, which were assembled for conscience and for years - on "Zaporozhets", on Niva, on Volga and UAZ SGR (in common parlance - "Bukhanka"). In addition, Mikhalych is not some pampered fop, but a life-hardened Slav. Buying cars from the showroom is for the weak, but to build a car from just a rusty body - that's manly!

When buying a new car, the player buys only the frame, but the engine, suspension and all other components are assembled at our request by the penitent Zhenka. The tuning itself does not take stars from the sky, it only affects the characteristics of the car. Forget about the tuning of the appearance at once. All these wheel covers, bumpers, spoilers, and other surpluses are for those who are crazy, Mikhalych is a simple guy. At least in the first phase of the game, until the player earns a better car. And if in FlatOut 2 we started with a bucket on wheels, in TRAIL OUT this stage of a very well maintained cars in the career drags almost to the finish of the game.

However, all this is just prejudice. After all, cars, no matter what brand they were, behave as in FlatOut 2: the higher Mikhalych moves up the career, the better his transport becomes. In terms of the balance of cars in TRAIL OUT is clearly more in favor of the game than the player. Sometimes you have to painfully save up for a better motor, otherwise you will not pass the next race. Change from car to car will have to often. This is not the old Need for Speed, where you can pass the game by the stock car with some skill.

Get ready for a stern challenge. It is not for nothing that the game has a function to adjust the level of artificial intelligence. TRAIL OUT was developed by FlatOut fans for FlatOut fans, and this game was sometimes stressful. Prepare for cars to behave in a way that's not exactly malleable, and any oncoming object can take a car into the stratosphere. Such physics was in FlatOut, so is the case in TRAIL OUT.

A stuntman's career has never attracted so much attention...

But Mikhalych's career progression through the blacklist is almost an original TRAIL OUT concept. In FlatOut 2 there was no plot, and the entire narrative was taken over by the opponents. Each of them was a unique individual with his own style of driving: one preferred exclusively fast sports cars, another - lightweight hatchbacks, and the third - didn't care about speed, but dragged on off-roaders. In TRAIL OUT the story is approximately the same, but the opponents here, to put it mildly, are not original. Meet Big Cheese. You might have an obsessive thought in your head that you've seen this guy somewhere before...

Some will say, "That's a reference," but I say that there should be enough references, because too many of them harm the game's identity.

Like FlatOut, TRAIL OUT is divided into chapters and stages. Took a certain number of points - defeat the boss and move on to the next class of car fresher. In addition to the classic laps and sprints, TRAIL OUT is full of activities: here you and derby, where cars pound with each other in the arena to the last survivor, here you and rally racing, and even bowling and playing darts body himself Mikhalych.

This activity was still in FlatOut, delivered a lot of fun and generally became the hallmark of the game. Now TRAIL OUT has the same business card. But the boss battles were dragged down by the ears, an unnecessary part of the game. It's in Need for Speed the battles with bosses were both interesting and logically justified. We understand where the developers of TRAIL OUT got this trick from, but here they made a grave logical mistake. In Need for Speed: Most Wanted these same bosses in the story initially did not pay attention to the player, because the latter was not a cheat. After the player won a certain number of races and became famous as a persistent violator of the law, the boss saw him as a competitor and a threat to his authority. Then the boss would challenge the player to a duel race, where his honor was at stake. The loser no longer had a claim to the title of best racer and dropped out of the game. And that makes sense!

In TRAIL OUT, whether the boss lost to Mikhalych for the blacklist title or won, he would still continue to participate in the festival. And okay, if each of the bosses could catch up with the player in the story and bring down, say, from 4 to 5 position, then there would be no complaints, in the festival TRAIL OUT would be felt competition, but so ... Well, what motivation can opponents continue to participate if Mikhalych will win sooner or later ...?

However, passing TRAIL OUT will not be easy, so the bosses can sleep easy. In addition to the results in the races themselves, there is a second indicator in the game - the number of Mikhalych's fans: the more he does well and the more spectacular his ride, the more people will watch the dashing stuntman. Here Trail Otsnova flirts with pop culture references: Mihalych sits in the Tik-Tok Fest App, streaming, even getting donations and performing fan chelongs, which used to be fashionable on Twitch. It's all about the views.

And with the mechanics of fans as a resource TRAIL OUT has a little trouble - at a certain point, these very fans have to grind painfully for further progress in the story. Pickiness is not critical, after all GOOD BOYS did a tremendous job, and admitted grindwall - a common mistake of beginners who can not finely build a balance in their games. On the other hand, the same problem was in the first FlatOut and no one whined...

Is TRAIL OUT worth buying?

TRAIL OUT is the best debut one can legitimately expect from a new team. The game has plenty of rough edges. These include specific gamepad driving physics, inappropriate humor, and balance problems. But for its class and price segment TRAIL OUT is a gift. And could we ever have dreamed that FlatOut 2 would rise from the flames like the Phoenix Bird?