![]() ![]() But consistently, the problem with these “nostalgic” games is that they stubbornly refuse to admit anything might have changed. There’s a lot of nostalgia on the shelves recently, with franchises being revived and unofficial sequels rolling out. No DLC, although the loading times can be pretty bad if you’re impatient. Sixteen sets of levels in the career mode, lots of modes on each map, and freeplay add up to a lot of playing time - at least eight hours worth. That surely will be funny a hundred times from now. Oh, ha ha, I hit a fat guy and you put up the words “BACON SLICER!” on the screen. But after a certain point, the jokes just wear thin, and frankly, many just aren’t all that funny in the first place. The game attempts to season, or really cover all this up, with lots of gore and snotty humor, and truthfully, there are some good ideas here, like fixing your car on the fly and rewarding exploring the levels. The result, every time you play, is a game that feels unfocused, a sandbox with not quite enough toys to play in. And some maps have more than 700 pedestrians to find, so good luck getting the win with that one. That can get aggravating with the game’s Gotta Squish ‘Em All! stance. But, the huge maps and poor handling, not to mention needing to flatten literally hundreds of them, means you’ll be sniping at a tiny target with a potato cannon. Recent car combat games such as Mad Max solved a lot of these issues, too, such as letting you hit a button while alongside an enemy and knock them off the road, which makes this all the more frustrating.įinally, you have, of course, the goal of flattening pedestrians. ![]() Landing a hit can be incredibly amusing, but the game doesn’t offer enough strategy or enough consistent tools to make it anymore than an opportunistic bit you can attempt to get a leg up. Worse, that means it can quickly get dull, which is the last way you should describe smashing a car into a wall repeatedly. But to do that, you’re located in giant arenas you can often wander aimlessly around in, and since your car has all the aerodynamics of a broken Frisbee, lining up a hit on the fly, let alone taking out an opponent, can be a tough proposition. But not being able to take a gentle curve without spinning out or trying to steer away from a wall from a thousand feet away and slamming right into it anyway because your car handles like a brick with wheels gets obnoxious fast. Granted, the franchise has always been about trolling the player, with previous entries even going so far as to use rear-wheel steering on some cars just to mess with you. First, you can race, but the cars you find all have absolutely terrible handling even when they’re not smashed to hell. The basic problem is that you’ve got three main goals, and the game actively fights you every step of the way toward completing them. You’ve got your racing, you’ve got your splatting pedestrians, you’ve got your car wrecks, and, well, that’s pretty much it. Like most games that made a fortune on Kickstarter thanks to nostalgia, this is deliberately not reinventing the wheel. Combined with the game’s tendency toward sophomoric jokes and bad puns, it’s all pretty amusing in a Beavis And Butthead sort of way, but it wears thin. It’s fairly generic, and you might be genuinely surprised to learn these are actual songs, not just generic metal from a bed music CD. Still, considering how rough the PC game was when it first launched, this is a decided improvement.Īs for the audio, it’s mostly screams, splats, revving engines, and thrash metal. The cars look good, although the environments and pedestrians you splat look a bit last-gen. It’s not going to stun you with how amazing everything is - this is hardly Gran Turismo in the graphics department. It has to be said, for a dev company that’s spent a lot of years in the wilderness of porting Atari games and bringing board games to consoles, Stainless Games’ return to Carmageddon looks pretty good. After nearly two decades away, the franchise is back to show console kids how it’s done, but does it have anything in the tank other than ’90s nostalgia? Carmageddon: Max Damage (PS4, Xbox One) And so it was with Carmageddon, a series all about squishing pedestrians and blowing things up. ![]() Console gamers had brightly-colored cheery games hopping on platforms for babies, and PC gamers had edgy games that were hardcore with gore and swears and metal solos. In the ’90s, there was a clear divide between PC gamers and console gamers. ![]()
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