At time of review Stainless have not promised their inclusion. Multiplayer has no pedestrians, arguably a large point of Carmageddon generally. But if you don’t want to do that you can still just destroy your opponents to gain the laps they’ve completed. There are however a smattering of new modes to play, kill a certain pedestrian, actually race, collect checkpoints, etc. It’s the exact same 1997 game with a facelift and a progression system that locks you to a limited number of tracks far more than the original. It’s an impressive turnaround from Reincarnation, however the over aggressive depth of field ruins the image by blurring everything far too much. Running our benchmarks on Maim Street the load times never exceeded 30 seconds. Thankfully things have improved drastically in Carmageddon Max Damage. Reincarnation had terrible loading times, it could take minutes to start a race if you were at 4k, even loading from SSD. To reach 60fps we had to go down to medium, a trade-off that was not worth making as 1440p ultra looks far better. Reducing shadow quality and translucency made a playable 30. Ultra proved far too demanding crashing down to the a low of 27. In high demand scenes there would be a momentary drop to 58, but these were still unusual, knocking down any setting a notch gave another rock solid framerate.Ĥk, my preferred resolution, was where the framerate finally fell. Moving up to 1440p produced an almost 60fps lock.
On our test machine running the city track, 1080p Ultra was a perfect 60fps lock. Let’s see if things have improved from that unoptimised mess.įirstly, there are a few options but the slider once again covers things nicely. It’s so similar that Stainless have removed Reincarnation from sale. RAM: 16GB Crucial Ballistix DDR3 1866MHzĬarmageddon Max Damage is effectively the patched version of Carmageddon Reincarnation. The maps are sparse, features such as the head-cam have been cut, it’s feels lethargic and lifeless, a cash grab using nostalgia. What’s most disappointing is the lack of care. There seems to have been no thought put into this release, and that is the sad thing, the spark that made the first so anarchic is dead. If you quit you are asked “Do you want to return to a life where you don’t get internal organs in your hair?”. But they are also lifted verbatim from the original release. This sense of nothing changing is everywhere. Even the attempts at shock seem quaint in a world with **GTA V** and other open world games and multiple first person war shooters. The very tracks you’ll play a couple of times then go back to Maim Street to unlock more tracks. Why Maim Street? It’s the best one for grinding out the track unlocks. There are new tracks amongst the originals, but the drip feeding of tracks feels worse than the original so you will spend a lot of time playing Maim Street. Pedestrians are even in the same places, although a few more have been added. It’s the exact same thing, only with better graphics and draw distance. So I booted up the original and, well look for yourselves:. I found myself experiencing a profound sense of deja-vu, the tracks, cars, even sound effects all felt like I’d played these before. Upgrade information doesn’t update across anywhere else. It’s all so pedestrian, which is sad for a game that prided itself on doing new things. Outside of the upgrade screen there is no indication that anything has been done to your car. Even the unlocks are the same things, wheels, armour and engine.
The in race upgrade system has been replaced with the current industry standard permanent unlock method. Destroying your opponents to steal their cars is as satisfying as ever, plowing into them head-first or running them into walls, but it’s all available in other games that offer far more now. It’s just a way to line yourself up by the car you can steal. There’s a race grid formation and positions, but outside of the specific racing mode it’s never that important. Racing is not the focus of Carmageddon, even though it’s technically a racing game.
If you’ve played any of the other entries in the series then it’s familiar, sometimes a little too familiar, but we’ll get to that eventually. Maps are strewn with pedestrians to hit and barrels to collect, even the cars are the same. It was censored in Germany turning the pedestrians into zombies, here in the UK there was the removal of the blood and gore just to get a release And was trying to stir up controversy at a time when video gaming was seen as a problem.Ĭarmageddon Max Damage is a game that embraces those roots. The original Carmageddon is famous for its controversy. Price: £19.99 on Steam (at time of review)