Carmageddon: Max Damage features a series of events and missions coming up to about 25-30 hours of single player gameplay. Players can dip more time into the game if they plan on achieving all the alternate victory conditions in each chapter. These include simply completing the objective to running over the right amount of civilians or destroying enough of your opponent’s vehicles. Causing mayhem is what Carmageddon is about, as the rules are only there to be broken. You can cause this devastation in one of 25 upgradeable cars, with their own individual stats as well as destructive capabilities. But killing civilians and blowing up cars is only as effective as the weaponry you pick up whilst driving around the massive open worlds you are placed into. These weapons will affect both opponents and pedestrians or will specifically target one group. Resulting in cars being bent into banana shapes, people’s heads being blown off and everyone getting electrocuted by generators on your cars bonnet. The wild and crazy ways you can defeat your enemies grows and grows with each pick up.

During the event we were able to play the game mode known as Classic Carma which allows you to play at your own leisure and win by any means necessary. From here we were given reigns of the franchises best known driver, Max Damage and his car the Red Eagle. Both look great with their updated models in this very colourful world. The vehicles over time when they receive damage will break apart piece by piece depending on where you were hit, resulting in your car even being split in half. When this occurs you can hold down the repair button to fix up your vehicle on the fly, however you will lose valuable points that you have gained through causing carnage. Parts of your car which have dropped into the world will magnetise back to your current position, instantly fixing things up and letting you get back into the game without worrying of respawning or having to find a repair shop. You will soon realise that the game is not built around conventional racing but is focused on you dicking around and having fun, which the game easily achieves.

Throughout the game we were able to run over pedestrians of all kinds as well as stumble into a stadium filled with football players and cheerleaders. But humans are only some of the targets you can run over for points as penguins, aliens and cows also fill up the roster, making the game hilarious. There are also opportunities to find your way onto rooftops as well as do battle underwater to keep you on your toes as the chaos can come and go anywhere. Quite frankly if you are looking for a game for pure, unadulterated fun then you might want to keep Carmageddon: Max Damage into consideration.

With that said however, we feel as if the game is not made for everyone. Nostalgic players from the games past will instantly fall in love again with the world, characters and destruction. New players however might have a hard time getting into the game. Ian, who accompanied me at the event, brought this up which sums up his impressions of the game after playing it:

“I’d liken it to a passion project, like when a bunch of nutters from Yorkshire building a car in a shed. It’s not much good and you certainly wouldn’t want to buy it, but it’s alright for a laugh to take it out for a spin in a field and have the wheels fall off.”

His reasons for this comment comes with how the game played out. The cars might have some amazing detail when it comes to their destruction, but they handle like Zambonis that are constantly trying to drift. The handling for these cars are so loose that a simple corner can involve you crashing into every wall nearby instead of committing to solid turns. This must be a problem for AI also as you may have a chance to completely lose sight of their vehicles as they are struggling to turn and constantly smacking against the face of buildings. The game would also be more appealing if the world itself didn’t look like something from a PS2 launch title. The textures of the grass and the majority of the buildings are poorly coloured in comparison to one another, creating a feel that kind of makes you think you were playing the game on a less intensive system. Carmageddon obviously does this to put more emphasis on the cars and the characters you can obliterate, but with this being a title on Xbox One and PS4, it will quickly become known as a dated game within the first few months. Fun gameplay can only take you so far.

That is a short look on Carmageddon: Max Damage coming out June 3rd for PS4 and Xbox One. What are your thoughts on the return of the franchise? Would you jump into a car and begin the onslaught? Let us know your thoughts below.