Carmageddon Max Damage Review - 90's cheese at its finest.

By Sam Coles:

I swear the past couple of years there have been games that were extremely popular in 90’s making a comeback on the 8^th generation of consoles with titles like Wolfenstein The New Order, DOOM, the upcoming Quake Champions and now we have Carmageddon. I don’t have a problem with this because the 1990’s was the golden age of gaming on both console and PC; Carmageddon was a very controversial game due to the violence of running over pedestrians. It was banned in several countries and altered to zombies in UK and robots in Germany. Does Max Damage live up to the name? Yes but it does have few faults with the gameplay.

You first pick which character you want to play as the main two from the old games return Max Damage and Die Anna. You then pick an event with different locales, the locations can get a bit samey because it seems like you’re driving through the same industrial area over and over.

The different events you can participate in are:

Classic Carma:

This is what you expect in a Carmageddon game a race with a sandbox nature where you have several ways you can finish the race. You can either finish it by destroying every racer, kill every single pedestrian or of course the boring way of finishing all the laps.

Pedestrian Chase:

What you have to do in this event is kill each pedestrian that is highlighted on your mini-map and the first to reach 10 kills wins. I wasn’t a fan of this mode because you can kill on ped and then the next one would be on the other side of the map.

Deathrace:

This is a traditional circuit race where you have to finish three laps or again you can kill all the drivers in the race if you’re mental!

Checkpoint Stampede:

This is the same as the pedestrian chase mode, but instead of killing people you must go through checkpoints and I have the same problems with this mode like I do with the other one because it slows the game down to a snail’s pace.

The gameplay does take a bit to get use to because the car physics are very bizarre and clunky, but once you get the hang of it it’s a lot of fun. It’s really satastfying to nail a corner with a sweet drift as you plough through a legion of pedestrians coupled with a shower of blood and giblets flying everywhere. During gameplay there are many ways you can obtain points which will unlock more challenging events for you to play, the way you can obtain more points is by killing pedestrians, destroying other drivers or collecting barrels that are scattered around the arenas.

Graphically it’s not the most impressive game I’ve seen the environments and textures are blurry and bland with a few frame rate hitches here and there. The pedestrians don’t look good, however I would argue that was purposely done because some levels can have nearly 1000 pedestrians that you can brutally kill. The car models look pretty good especially when they take damage, with details such as your car splitting in half to it completely exploding, you can repair your car on the fly and I love that the bits of shrapnel comes flying back onto your car it’s a nice touch.

Carmageddon Max Damage is an enjoyable yet flawed experience with a few clunky mechanics, but it is still a lot of fun I would recommend getting this and plus it’s a budget title so you have no excuse.