REVIEW: Carmageddon: Max Damage

When the original Carmageddon released back in 1997 it was considered to be the most controversial video game to ever be released. Yes, Mortal Kombat had already allowed you to rip the spines out of your opponents five years prior and Doom was a first-person murder-fest which instructed you to gun down thousands upon thousands of demons, but Carmageddon was a game where the primary gameplay loop involved running over hundreds of innocent civilians at high speed in order to get credits to fix up your car which you damaged by ramming into pedestrians, your opponent’s car or the environment. Twenty long years later and Carmageddon has returned and thousands of the game’s civilians still haven’t learned that being outdoors in this game series is a very, very bad idea.

I remember the original Carmageddon. I remember not being allowed to play the original Carmageddon but sticking the finger to my parents and playing it anyway…albeit when they weren’t home because a parent’s wrath is terrifying no matter how old you get. While nostalgia can be a powerful tool for remembering the greatness of a game, that doesn’t always mean that game is, in reality, that good (cough, Sonic Adventure, cough).

To your fake surprise, the original Carmageddon doesn’t play exactly how I remember it playing—it’s a lot clunkier and awkward than what my memories tell me—but Carmageddon: Max Damage feels exactly as your nostalgia imagines the original game being and it doesn’t look like a bunch of squares crashing into another bunch of squares…much. If you want to bring back your happy memories of Carmageddon without ruining them by playing the original, Max Damage has you covered.

Just like the original, Carmageddon is filled to the brim with nineties edginess. From the very start, Carmageddon allows you to choose between the cheesily monikered Max Damage—who has a car with a literal Mohawk—and Die Anna before being thrown into your first level of Classic Carma gameplay. Every one of Carmageddon’s sixteen chapters feature a number of separate matches consisting of one of the game’s six game modes. The remaining amount of credits you have left—earned from killing innocents, hitting and destroying opponents and breaking the hundreds of barrels around the map which also hide the game’s ninety power-ups—go towards unlocking the next chapter. Each level also allows you to destroy a single car in order to add it to your garage and the further you progress, the more locations you unlock, video game 101 really.

Classic Carma, as the title would suggest, is the standard game mode from the original game where you choose between mowing down all the pedestrians, destroying all of your opponent’s cars or finishing the race first. Classic Carma is definitely the most fun game mode in the game as it gives you a large amount of variety in how you wish to tackle the game. The rest of the game modes are a lot more limiting as every other mode consists of taking a single object—whether it be a pedestrian, a checkpoint, a lap or an opponent—before the other players or by murdering someone else to steal their points.

While the amount of content game-mode-wise is quite disappointing, the rest of the game is brimming with content. As well as the hefty single-player mode, you also have freeplay and multiplayer modes allowing you to play whatever combination or self-made variants of the six game modes across dozens of map variants—based off of five main locations—using one of over thirty customizable vehicles either online with friends or offline with AI foes. For a budget game, Carmageddon is surprisingly full of content for players to burst through.

The budget, however, is sadly apparent quite quickly in Max Damage. Visually, Max the game fails to impress with its only sometimes pleasing cel-shaded style—which varies widely in how cel-shaded certain assets look—being used to mask fairly low-quality textures across environments and low-poly models across its many pedestrians. Lighting is fairly simple but effective and the game’s effects do the job just fine, especially with fairly crisp shadows, but the bells and whistles of a higher budget game are noticeably missing.

If you’re playing Carmageddon how it is meant to played though, then this shouldn’t really matter all that much. Carmageddon is meant to be played fast, smashing and drifting through as many people and things as possible before crushing someone else’s car against a wall, up a ramp or into a giant fan. The power-ups and modifiers that you can find around the map are usually found in large rows or clusters of barrels and, if you have enough credits from your murder spree, you can purchase them from a quick menu found on the D-Pad, meaning that if you have the credits for it, you can always call in a crazy weapon in order to help you out.

Carmageddon, initially, is a fun time with slightly more than passable visuals. The game still feels like classic Carmageddon and as I noted earlier, classic Carmageddon isn’t as great as you remember it being. The problem with nearly every vehicle combat game somehow makes its way into this one. The fast-paced action is slowed down by being hit by a car and then slowly pushed around the map as you try to wiggle your way out of their grasp. At times you’ll eventually be left trying to take down a vehicle by ramming into it over and over again which doesn’t do as much damage as it probably should.

The original game being known for its aforementioned edginess is, in actuality, quite tame in a world after Mortal Kombat X and the recent reboot of Doom. Even though one of the police vehicles is known by the acronym for Combat Unit: Nil Threat and the loading screens spout phrases such as “Is anyone actually f****** reading this?”, the game is nowhere near as offensive as the original game was in the nineties, especially in Wales where the acronym for Combat Unit: Nil Threat is pretty much used as punctuation.

It’s fun, admittedly, to mow down the entirety of a football stadium or drift your way down a beach full of people whilst using a power-up to turn your opponent’s car into the shape of a banana, but the fun and the shock humour doesn’t last long enough for all of Carmageddon’s content to feel as satisfying six hours in as it felt the first time you played.

Admirably, Stainless Games have put a lot of effort into bringing fans a worthy successor to the Carmageddon name. While everything is fairly low-detail, there’s a lot of variation between civilian models, and Stainless have packed a lot of hidden jokes and references in each level. Every car has a bunch of different skins along with their own upgrades and rims and there’s even a built-in instant replay feature allowing you to get some pretty great shots on some amazing moments even though the replay system itself is extremely fiddly with a controller.

What makes Carmageddon even worse than it could have been is the fairly awkward handling on the cars. The majority of cars feel kind of stiff—although Vlad’s Annihilator is slipperier than a soap bar. As a result of this, the slow moments in Carmageddon become frustrating moments as you desperately try to turn your car around and then eventually softly ram the car that’s been following you for minutes, doing absolutely nothing of note to your opponent at all.

Sadly, the AI in Max Damage also isn’t all that great. During every game mode some of your opponents will just wander off and mess around in a certain area of the map for awhile until you or someone else slams into them and knocks them to their senses. Some enemies have even spent the majority of a match just parked against a wall or speeding around trying to take down a single pedestrian that continually dodged them. While Carmageddon does feel like a game intended for its multiplayer, the performance of the game’s AI is shockingly inconsistent from match to match.

Summary

Carmageddon: Max Damage isn’t a bad game but it’s also not a great one. For the first few hours I had enormous amounts of fun as the game was surprisingly what I remembered the original Carmageddon being. Awkward handling, low-detail graphics, AI issues and a lot of repetition, however, make Carmageddon less than great, but on occasions, it can still be a fun time.

With the right power-ups and speed, Carmageddon can eventually become a beautifully manic game full of offensive humour and gratuitous gore. While this may be the best Carmageddon game, Carmageddon was sadly never that great to begin with.