Carmageddon Reincarnation

Ah, the thrills of driving like an idiot. There’s nothing quite like skipping the start line, running over the guy carrying the chequered flag, skidding off the road and running over several pedestrians while trying to hit the guy in a dragster because, hey, he got in your way back there and you feel like breaking him and his ride in two.

Wait a minute, what do you mean there was a race going on?

So it would seem that after a decade and a half being off the road, Carmageddon has revved up it’s engines and gotten back on the path of destruction once more. After over a year of being in Early Access on Steam, the game has been ‘officially’ released. Unfortunately, the Early Access marker is something that will be held against the game, and it’s simply because the game performs under par on even the best systems out there. Even on a PC that far surpasses the recommended specs for the game, expect frequent hang-ups and glitches to pollute your experience, and this is on a game that is currently running at 30fps. Now I’m not one to knock games for choosing 30fps over 60fps, but having a recent release with far more intense graphics that runs several times smoother (Witcher 3) is pretty embarrassing for a game that has been in public testing for a year.

But what about the game? Thankfully, if you liked the previous entries in the series (particularly the first two) then you are in for a treat. Right from the off, the game is classic Carmageddon (hell, the mode on the first level is even called Classic Carma) and you can get right to the mayhem that fans of the series would expect, running down unlucky peds and chasing down fellow drivers, or hey, even completing the actual race. Along the career as well, you will find other modes that do more than simply ask you to run a pre-set course against five other maniacs. And every event you complete can be customized and replayed in Free-play mode to your heart’s content, and every car you see driven by an opponent can be stolen and driven by yourself.

For newcomers as well, this game does not require much learning. A simple tutorial in the first level (which you can also ignore if you so please) will get you up to speed with how the world works, provided you aren’t smashed in half by someone in the first sixty seconds. However, if the previous entries have not been your cup of tea, then this game will do little to sway you. This game is in a way, a much shinier looking Carmageddon 2, and very little gameplay wise has changed, if anything at all. Word of warning to veterans as well, the game still seems to use the same physics, meaning cars sometimes feel like they have little weight or difference in control to them (barring the truly absurd ones) and if you tired of that in Carmageddon 2, then expect more of the same here.

Overall, the game is good old fun, a retro throwback for those who have tired of the latest stretch of driving games. But I can only recommend for series veterans, and newcomers with money to spare. £20 is a bit much for a game that is mostly a remake of a seventeen-year-old classic.