FlatOut 4: Total Insanity VR, out now in Early Access on SteamVR, is an absolute car wreck and that is the essence of its charm. Across multiple gameplay modes, the mutually assured destruction of you and your competitors will have you coming back again and again.
The track veers off the paved road into a dirt side path that makes my car shake enough to consider getting the suspension looked at. Another car sideswipes me as it takes a tighter line on a turn, knocking me off course into a fence. I recover, but a part of the fence is stuck on my windshield for several seconds before falling away from the centrifugal force of the next turn. Dirt is kicking up all around my car, partially blocking my view. Just before the dirt gives way to paved road again, I look over to my passenger side, where the passenger door is damaged from the sideswipe and flapping open and closed. I can’t help but smile. In terms of fun factor, FlatOut 4: Total Insanity VR delivers in spades.
What is it?: A multiplayer destructive arcade racing game
Platforms: PC VR (Early Access)
Release Date: May 7, 2026
Developer: Flat2VR Spark, Mutar
Publisher: Impact Inked
Price: $19.99
The game has multiple gameplay modes, with some maps and options locked behind a points progression system earned by simply playing the game. The same goes for the vehicles. At the start, the Stunt mode only offers one car and other modes like Carnage and Beat The Bomb have a couple at the most. Be prepared for a bit of grinding to unlock more of the game, but it is so much fun it doesn’t feel like a grind.
Take the Stunt mode, for instance. You drive down a ramp before ejecting your driver out of the car into either a set of giant Solo cups in an unhinged game of cup pong or staged block towers meant to be destroyed Angry Birds style. All three rounds are over in less than two minutes, followed by a look at the leaderboards, your final score, and then run it back.
My PC uses a Ryzen 7 9850X3D processor with 32GB of DDR5 and an RTX 5070 Ti GPU.
The game was played using a Meta Quest 3 via the Virtual Desktop app on the Ultra graphics preset.
FlatOut has several graphics settings for shadows, SSAO (Screen Space Ambient Occlusion), textures, and particles, all of which were turned to the highest setting.
You can find the minimum and recommended specs on the Steam page to learn more.
Beat The Bomb is a series of ten to thirty second sprints from checkpoint to checkpoint with a bomb ready to explode if you don’t make it. Unless you are really good out of the gate, this is over in maybe a minute. These are the shortest modes in the game, with the battle arena and traditional race modes lasting longer, but everything in FlatOut is designed to keep you coming back for more. I can do better than that becomes the inner monologue as you charge back in for more.
Visually, the game has a grungy grit aesthetic and moves fast enough that any visual flaws are quickly forgotten. There is some noticeable clipping and artifacting, particularly in fast, tight turns on bigger maps like the carnage races, but again, it passes so quickly that I had to be looking for it to notice. I did turn the body IK off later in my gameplay as I found the arm clipping when I looked left or right to be distracting. The sacrificed immersion was worth it, personally, since there is no way to customize the driver to look more like me. Another thing to note is everything in the cockpit, the speedometer, the rear view mirror, etc. all function.
Sound design is mostly good, though echolocating other cars from spatial audio was difficult as the sound of the other cars felt muted compared to everything else. This stood out most in the arena mode with so many cars running around that it was tough to isolate which direction an incoming hit was coming from. The soundtrack is excellent, invoking the vibes of late ’90s and early ’00s racers like Cruis’n USA, but with a harder rock edge.
FlatOut 4: Total Insanity VR is an intense VR experience, with a lot of camera shaking from rough terrain and impact with other cars & objects. Most gameplay modes are in a first person view inside the car with cutaways to third person for some (but not all) crashes. Crashes are very jarring and the car will flip and tumble in first person from a hard enough hit.
We would not recommend FlatOut for newer VR users.
I do not own a racing wheel, so I cannot comment on how good that support is, but there is a plethora of options to fine-tune it as needed. Analog driving was responsive and can also be refined with sensitivity options in the menu. The driver position and cockpit can all be adjusted for different types to get into the most comfortable view.
There are some Early Access issues, like menu behavior and positioning. In multiplayer, the names of other players were out of position sometimes and only rendered in one eye. I would like to see the pop up UI for the currently playing song moved as it overlaid instructions in some areas, like the Stunt mode. The ‘Try Again’ option by pressing the X button did not function at all, forcing me to exit the game mode back to the main menu, and reselect it. Everything I noticed is a fixable issue and hopefully will be remedied before the final release.
Overall, FlatOut 4: Total Insanity VR is a joy to play. Despite the stated issues, the core gameplay is already strong enough to make Total Insanity an easy recommendation.
