A wise man once said “Things Change” and it is something that compliments video games extremely well. Things do change, what was once seen as popular and fashionable in gaming over the years can become something you look back at and roll your eyes at how you ever considered it to be worth playing. Some games can be a testament to the era in which they were created much as some look back at the 80s and question the music, fashion and technology with bewildering concern. Gaming has had some real questionable releases over the past decades but it has also has some amazing ones which can be brought back as remasters and still stand up today as a gaming experience as they once did years ago. Sadly, coming up is one example that some things should be left in the past and that nearly 20 years since its original release, Carmageddon Max Damage should have been put in the garage and left alone to rust.
The first Carmageddon was released back in 1997, at the end of the 90s and was inspired by the 1975 film Death Race 2000. It was an ultra violent gore fest with one real aim, to kill all pedestrians using your car whilst battling other drivers doing the same. It was pretty much the car version of DOOM but it celebrated the gore and murder in a cartoonish almost B movie style, and it was very much of the time and I remember playing it on my trusty Amiga. But as I opened with, things do change, and the very concept of what made Carmageddon stand out is not really something that in 2016 that is a good fit. When I heard that the 2015 PC title Carmageddon: Reincarnation, originally a Kick-starter campaign, was being brought to Xbox One and Playstation 4 as Carmageddon Max Damage I really had my doubts about it, and now having played it, it is very obvious this was a disastrous decision.
Put simply, Carmageddon Max Damage is a shockingly terrible addition to a series that truly has no place outside of discussions of what used to be popular in gaming. Max Damage is horrible, across the board it simply fails to do anything well and is frustratingly bad at everything it tries to do. It feels like a cheap arcade title and the quality is far less than the asking price suggests, lacking anything that would justify the retail price it has of £29.99 both as a full retail disc release and digitally on PS4 and Xbox One stores.
To start with, Carmageddon Max Damage is ugly, and I am talking barely last gen level of visuals with absolutely nothing being done since its PC release last year to even attempt to polish it up in anyway for a current gen console release. At first I thought the developers may have been trying to keep it in line with how the original Carmageddon games looked and in so paying some degree of nostalgia nod to them but honestly, it is just a god awful looking game. Everything from the pedestrians to the environments you “race” on are so basic that you feel as the Xbox One Controller in your hand may as well be connected to a year one Xbox 360 or a Playstation 3, whilst streaming this, my viewers thought I was playing on a Playstation 2 for crying out loud. The Cars all look rather generic and the first time you encounter a 2D drawn barrel in a 3D environment you just roll your eyes, something that happens so much in this game that you may come away doing the best impression of WWE’s The Undertaker ever!
Then there is how the cars themselves handle and after playing Max Damage, I forgive Watchdogs for its driving mechanics. Each car feels heavy and a real sluggish kind of heavy that using an analogue controller is pointless; I had more control using an Amiga keyboard back in the day. That makes driving at speed really laborious as a simple knock can send you spinning into hazards or buildings. You can collect upgrade tokens through the course to upgrade Car Parts but honestly I never felt they improved handling in anyway. The only visual aspect I did like was in how you can repair your car damage and the animation of parts from your car flying back to you to reform on the car is fun. The environments you race on are large areas designed to be used in all the race types and modes and have different areas to explore should you feel the need to try either the Free Roam mode or just go off for a scenic route drive during a race.
Carmageddon would not be Carmageddon if the streets were not full of pedestrians to kill and these all come in different visual styles but I will address this more a bit later in this review. It has the issue that the longer a race goes on for, you will actually run out of pedestrians to take out after initially the game will throw them in groups exactly where you are racing but I found that after a few laps or returning to the same areas of the map to chase checkpoints, all you find are corpses from earlier and in a game that markets itself on the brutality to pedestrians, having none to actually take out just ends up leaving the racing gameplay left and that really saps the enjoyment right out of you.
Now another way to win each mode is to destroy the other racers by wrecking their cars. In career certain cars will be highlighted as targets for you and should you wreck them it will unlock that car and driver for the player to use. As ugly as this game is, the AI of the other racers is equally a shambles as at times you will notice that some of the other races get lost and even stuck in the map, which immediately takes them out of the game. The racers that can keep up often have such a boring attacking manner that the race turns into dodgems ride rather than a demolition derby. They will hit you but just focus on trying to push you around, even failing to use any of the power up weapons available. I found myself getting stuck in a sumo wrestling match with them trying to push my car around which gets really boring, really fast. You as the player have to be the aggressor all the time and that is dull as the racing is a travesty.
Ultimately I found that the main reason Carmageddon Max Damage fails so hard, in addition to it just being an awfully put together game, is that it simply doesn’t belong in 2016. It feels dated and out of place in today’s era of gaming and each time one of the on screen slogans pops up after doing something in game such as calling you a “cunning stunt” after flipping your car is more cringe worthy than funny. This now brings me back to the pedestrians themselves which for me had me questioning why this game was even released on console if for no other reason than to make some money from the name on the box. I have no desire for entertainment and certainly not for comedic purposes, to run over animals, overweight people or disabled people in wheelchairs for my gaming pleasure. It is really all just very needless and tactless and far from being the non politically correct nature that the original Carmageddon games used in a time that it was more acceptable or seen as dark humour, today it is just offensive on every level. I found it far more distasteful to see the various types of pedestrians used in the game and even made the effort in game to swerve to actively avoid hitting animals and those in wheelchairs during races and finding myself doing that just made Carmageddon all the more difficult a game to endure and certainly not one I would want to carry on playing going forward.
Carmageddon Max Damage is ridiculously bad, and I mean really bad. I am stressing this point over and over because I want to spare others the misery of playing it. Right now it is so undeserving of its current price tag of £29.99; it lacks anything whatsoever to give that price tag validity. It is awful to play, terrible to watch someone play and right now is in the lead for worse game of the year for me. If for some reason you are tempted to pick this up, please wait for the inevitable price drop to bargain bin level before waiting some more for it to then go into a sale of bargain bin titles and just to be on the safe side, wait till you upset someone enough to buy you this as a birthday or Christmas present and know that the person giving you it hates you!
Carmageddon Max Damage should be left in the junkyard to be nothing more than scrap metal and left to rust in peace!
