Carmageddon: Reincarnation Review

I remember the early days of Carmageddon when it was first released in 1997, it was bloody, explosive fun where I would destroy other cars with glee and worry less about how long it took to finish a lap. You raced your way to victory with cars filled with explosives, saws, and other assorted weapons of death and tore apart civilians into meaty chunks. This was one of the violent games of the 90s that brought about a lot of concern from parents and even politicians as they believed that the game was far too violent. Carmageddon: Reincarnation tries to bring those old memories back to life, however it fails in almost every way to improve on its old recipe. The game is filled with wonky controls, plenty of performance issues and is in some cases an actual hassle to even start up.

I have to say that installing and getting this game to run was one of the biggest hassles I have experienced since I went through the nightmare of having Windows Vista on my computer. In my first attempt to get the game running I got about as far as the intro screen and then was greeted with a crash message. I updated my video drivers and verified my Steam files, assuming that something had gone wrong while installing. Upon booting the game up again I was treated to the same crash message. I searched the forums and found that I had to update my Windows service pack, however I had the newest updates, so I decided to reinstall the service packs. I was finally able to get the game past the intro screen; unfortunately it doesn’t get much better than that.

The performance of this game for a full release title this game is one of the least optimized I have seen by far. The game engine sputters and stutters much like a decimated car in the game. When it comes to frames the game grinds its face into the asphalt as it struggles to stay at a steady 30 fps. There were some maps that would literally crush the game’s own engine like a car in a compactor. One of your only options to lower the risk of crashes and massive frame drops is to lower your graphics settings. Doing this also makes you realize that the games graphics are deplorable for a full release game.

For a 10GB download I was expecting the games graphics to be decent looking, maybe not Project CARS beautiful but something better than what looks like the original Carmageddon. Honestly, I am sorely disappointed with how this game looks, it’s just trying to play on our desire for nostalgia and it doesn’t even do that well. So here’s my question; how can a game with such poor graphics actually have performance issues? I understand that the game is generating hundreds of civilians for us to run over, but it still doesn’t explain the fact that I am able to run The Witcher 3 at high settings and still get 30fps whereas this game I have trouble maintaining 30 fps at medium settings. In all honestly I felt like I was looking at a game I would have played at the arcade in a Dave and Buster’s rather than a full release PC title.

Going off of the idea of playing this game at the arcade I also found that the gameplay for Carmageddon: Reincarnation was about as much fun as most arcade games. The studio did very little to revolutionize or change any of the gameplay mechanics. You simply race other cars of death and try to kill as many pedestrians as possible while they do the same animation loops, over and over again. In the main game mode, classic, you can win through either finishing the race, killing every single pedestrian, or wrecking every single enemy car. You can collect various coloured barrels that give various power-ups and boosts. The online racing was an enormous hassle to play because it could take up to five minutes or more for me to even find a match and it just felt clunky once I actually played because of the poor driving mechanics.

One would think that a game focused entirely on driving car would have proper car mechanics. Some of the cars literally feel like a brick when taking them around a corner. At times you can even hit the smallest bump or curb and you will literally fight to keep your car from spinning out.

Overall the only time I had any amount of fun was when I was playing against actual people online. Exchanging pieces of metal and rubber with my enemies is fun; however the excitement is short lived. You can only spend so many hours bashing your way through other cars and mowing down pedestrians. The game has extremely poor controls, deplorable game performance, and game modes that get old very quickly. With poor graphics and tedious controls, Carmageddon fails on almost all fronts to provide actual fun. Carmageddon was fun to play back in the 90’s but it just doesn’t feel like it belongs in this time.