Intro

Carmageddon is such a fun formula, it really is a shame it's wasted on these pathetically incompetent developers.

It's a very simple game. There's a map full of pedestrians. You have 5 opponents. You can race, wreck the enemy or kill all the pedestrians. You can pick from two dozen cars but only about half of them are viable. The main source of gameplay variety are the power ups.

With so few elements you're probably wondering how they still managed to mess it up. They've been at this for two decades. This is the 4th Carmageddon game and the third they've developed. Very little has changed since the first game.

Power Up Auto-Switching

The main game mode is Career mode. Most players will start the game and go straight into it. I just found out after 30 hours that if you're not in Career mode the "gameplay" menu has an option to turn off automatically switching to power ups you pick up. Honestly, i could

This single thing practically ruins the game by itself. Most of the game revolves around using power ups. But by default these switch when you pick up a new one. You will constantly get into trouble because you've planned to use a "pup" as they call it, only to discover it got switched out. It's incredibly frustrating.

Auto-switching power ups is up there with the worst design decisions in gaming history. Whoever thought that was a good idea should be {redacted}. Whoever decided to hide the option in the identical looking main menu in Career mode should also be {redacted}. Several times.

Power Ups

As i said, these are the biggest part of the game. Some kill pedestrians ("peds"), some hurt opponents, some hurt you and others allow for special navigation (jump/float). Aside from auto-switching there are two problems:

First of all, there is no distinction in anti-ped and anti-car power ups. Most of the time you'll specifically want one that targets one of these groups but you'll probably end up getting ones that target the other group.

Secondly, you can't drop power ups. And there are dozens of them. And there are no specific hotkeys other than the four PIP ones. You're constantly stuck with garbage power ups that you have to scroll past to get to the good ones. Oh, and did i mention that while scrolling they only show about 5 of these at a time and that even this selection is hidden when you're not scrolling. Good luck using what you actually want to use.

Upgrade System

You can upgrade your armor/attack/power up to level 5, up to a combined total of 12 levels (e.g. 4/4/4, 5/2/5). You have to buy these upgrades with coins that show up in maps. If you have too many coins they won't spawn. Every time you buy an upgrade you will get a confirmation screen where the default option is no.

This entire system is 100% useless, tedious, pointless and stupid to boot. Why would you want to discourage people from using newly unlocked cars if you don't have enough coins to upgrade them? It's just embarassingly bad design.

Career Mode Level Selection

In Career mode there are 16 "levels", each with 2-4 alternative modes (e.g. wreck X opponents). You have to unlock each level by scoring enough points. You have to replay maps to unlock new ones. Excess points are wasted. It's tedious and pointless and bad design.

There is also zero logic in the way maps and modes are assigned. You would expect each level to unlock a new map, with the alternative modes taking place on that map. Nope, they're all jumbled. One to play a specific one? Good luck finding it.

Conclusion

Yes, i'm still recommending it. Not at the ridiculous full price of €17, but certainly discounted to about €5. It's ugly. It has lots of terrible music. Unlocking stuff is tedious. Finding all the pedestrians is insanely time-consuming even if you find the single power up that shows them on the map (yes, there's only a single one on each map). Half the cars are useless because you can't control them by default or when there's someone stuck on your spikes. The power up system by itself is so bad that whoever designed it that way should be banned from game design for life.

But it's still Carmageddon. It's still really fun to ram cars, shoot anvils at little old ladies and crush police cars with a bulldozer. Just make sure you disable automatic power up switching in the Gameplay menu outside of Career mode.