If I’m dead honest, I get the best results from violence, which is probably because I’m such a pussycat in real life. If games didn’t have the ability to chill me out after a tough spell, I wouldn’t bother. Nothing is better than unwinding at the end of a long day with a spot of blasting in Call of Duty or Destiny, a bit of sightseeing with Uncharted or an hour or so of banter on Rocket League. Likewise, what were once impressive new gameplay mechanics and sprawling maps are now painfully aged.For a lot of people, myself included, playing games is a form of catharsis. But what once were belly laughs in the time before games like Saints Row The Third set a new high bar for crude humor are now chuckles (though plowing into a cow wearing a radiation suit on an Area 51-ish stage is pretty damn funny). The jokes are intentionally low-brow, with the f-word and sex-joke puns thrown about liberally. Its cartoonish violence is clearly not to be taken seriously. As for the intangibles, don’t worry – despite the fact that you’re actively rewarded with points and/or extra race time for splattering citizens in its dystopian future world, Carmageddon’s tongue is wedged firmly in cheek in the humor department. There’s an element of danger in picking them up, too, as some can actually negatively affect you.

The car-on-car violence is made even crunchier by some great random power-ups, which run the gamut from “pelvic thrusts” that launch enemy cars away from you to an anvil launcher that does exactly what you think it does. I wish their floaty handling were tighter, but when you land a big hit on a foe, it explodes them in a highly satisfying ball of fiery death.

We get to take our pick from hot rods to monster trucks to my favorite, the DeLorean, aka the “Degoryun” – complete with openable gull-wing doors you can use to whack pedestrians in the head with. As you’d expect the accompanying speed-metal soundtrack is grating, and not in a good way, though it can mercifully be turned off in the options menu so you can enjoy the sound of crunching metal in peace.Ī much-needed strong point is the selection of cars, which is impressively diverse. Adding insult to injury, every event is preceded by a painful loading time that lasts a bit over one minute as well – which is baffling considering these graphics are decidedly last-gen, particularly on the indoor “Storage Vats” course. But one interesting mode does not a robust game make. The best of the challenges, though, is a race that lets you win by either hitting all of the checkpoints first, wiping out all rival racers first, or running over every pedestrian on the map first, because then you at least have a bit of choice and variety to help keep things interesting. Some are straight races, in which case plowing your spike-loaded vehicle through pedestrians has little payoff (which seems contrary to the theme of over-the-top vehicular homicide) others are sprints to random checkpoints another more appropriately bloodthirsty mode has everyone racing to kill the same marked pedestrian first. Those events play out in progressively unlocked fashion in the career mode, which escorts you through various stages across different locales.

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