TRAIL OUT

Trail Out is an attempt to capture the FlatOut audience that are demanding more in the series. I think it manages to capture the FlatOut 3's flaws though with poor graphics, glitches and questionable handling.

The bland voice acting is an odd choice because it doesn't take itself seriously yet isn't really trying to be humorous either. There's a few Fast and the Furious references, but they could have taken the homage a bit further.

The concept is that you win events to be able to challenge the next character on the leaderboard and work your way up the 8 ranks to be the champion. I liked how the characters were distinctive and you raced against them in every race; which means you can build up some organic rivalries.

To be able to challenge the next character, you need to finish 3rd or above in every single event, then there's a certain amount of "fans" you need too. A few sections required me to grind out more fans using the single race feature. Another way of gaining fans is going to the "Fest App" menu and "Live stream" for your fans. All it does is pan a mobile phone at your character's face and your fans give you likes - it's very pointless.

Here you can claim some bonus money for unlocking achievements, and claiming "donations" from your fans which are small amounts like $3, it's just not worth your time.

Another thing you can do in that menu is play "Dead Out" which is a bonus zombie game. This seems even jankier than the main game. Some controls are displayed incorrectly on the UI like the torch, and the instructions say to hit your car to flip it over, but it didn't work for me - so I gave up after a few minutes.

In the main game, you buy scrapped cars, then upgrade them with body, engine, wheels etc, although you basically need all the parts except Nitro to actually come up with a workable car. Once you raise a bit of money, you don't need to put any thought into it - just buy all the best parts.

The cars feel way too light and so it is incredibly easy to flip your car. It seems obvious the heavy cars aren't actually heavier since they seem to flip easier, if anything. I did see some old reviews claiming the cars had a good weight to them, and saw a recent patch claim to have changed the handling, so maybe they broke it in recent times.

I also saw patch notes about increasing the performance, and it's definitely not right. I also saw "Increased overall grip. The difference between tires isn't that big of a difference now". When I experimented with the different tires, I found that the drift tires didn't seem to drift as well as the rally ones, so maybe they screwed them up also.

It can be a bit glitchy and I saw some spectacular bugs. For example, I slammed into a car, went flying the opposite direction (unlocking an achievement for travelling 300mph), but I did manage to destroy the car I crashed into.

Just like FlatOut, the game makes use of ragdolls, so if you crash hard, you may see your body fly through the windshield and ragdoll about. You don't die though, you simply respawn back in your vehicle like nothing happened. There are some bonus events (also inspired by FlatOut) like "bowling", "darts" and more which involve you flinging yourself towards targets.

There's plenty of destructible scenery, and some tracks force the leader to destroy objects like doors to create a path. Many tracks have multiple paths in sections, so there's even more objects to destroy. When there's so many objects and particles and explosions, it is quite key for the developers to make sure the framerate doesn't drop, but you will see a very inconsistent framerate. In the Eliminator race, a rocket is fired at the car in last place when the timer completes which causes a noticeable pause as it hits. There were times I had to lower the graphics settings to try and rebalance what I was seeing, but the graphics don't even look too good on the default, nevermind if you lower them.

There are spectators that are sometimes on the track, and they either try to dodge out of the way or just run into your car.

After each race, you need to repair your car which is one button click and is extremely cheap, so why not just auto-repair? If you opt for the "Sponsor" or "Fan" paint job, your car does auto-repair and gives you boosts to money or fans respectively. So you may as well always go for them once you can afford them.

In some races, you choose a car from your garage, usually limited by the class. Other events give you all a set car. There's some interesting races like go-karts, buses, heavy goods vehicles, and even a Batmobile.

The destruction derby arenas are really easy to cheese because you can reset at will. So if you go charging into a corner and are about to get rammed and trapped - you just teleport out of there and laugh at the computer who ploughs into a wall. They really should limit resets to certain scenarios or by the amount you can do per event.

I think the soundtrack is composed of up-and-coming rock bands, and there's plenty of great tracks and it suited the mood.

Sometimes the UI doesn't work with the gamepad, so I often just used the mouse: sometimes nothing was highlighted, sometimes you got 2 items highlighted!

I got to the final sets of races, acquired gold medals in the majority of that set of races, but couldn't get a medal on the “Cross: Figure 8” event which prevented me from being able to race the final racer (since you need a medal on every track). It's completely bugged. How can I finish 1st in all the other races then can't finish higher than 5th? My car usually can gain a massive lead on some tracks, but I could barely keep up with the laggards. What I noticed from experimentation, was that when I was using the nitro, I wasn't gaining on the opponents. It was like the rubber-banding was bugged and automatically activated nitro when you used it. I tried all kinds of different cars to see if there was some alternative strategy, but the heavy 4 wheel drive cars were flipping over more often on the curved surface. Changing the difficulty slider seemed to make a difference to the times the top 3 opponents finished, but made no difference to where I could finish. The developers seemed to respond quickly to people’s questions or complaints on the Steam forum, but for whatever reason have ignored mine. So until they patch it; I cannot complete the game.

Don't get me wrong, I did have a lot of fun playing Trail Out, but it's one of those games where you have got to put up, or appreciate the jank. It's probably created by a small team, so you can't expect some AAA polish. I do find it strange when the game has obvious flaws but then there's features like the Dead Out bonus game which would have taken developer time away from the main game. Then you know they will have been aware of performance issues from an early stage but then decided to add more objects, explosions and particles to cause further problems.