The AI racers don't seem too concerned with victory, so once you've got your head around the rather bizarre U-turns and twists of the race layouts, you can easily power to victory just by concentrating on hitting the checkpoints. A tiny and rather useless minimap in the corner of the screen isn't much help for getting you back on target if you get spun around and still hope to win on laps.Įven so, winning the race isn't particularly hard. Routes are crudely marked, and checkpoints are easily missed. The design of the tracks, unfinished though they are, is more than a little confusing - particularly since they need to serve as both linear courses and bloodbath arenas at the same time.
Right now, that fun comes more from the moment-by-moment mayhem of being free to careen around causing gory carnage, however. This is a game that remains quite simply fun, at a very innate, primal and, yes, gloriously dumb level. Yet even with control that feels a little too much like hard work for such a knockabout romp of a game, the joys of thundering into an opponent with a spiked battering ram, or sending ragdoll civilians pinwheeling into the air in a shower of blood, is still pretty potent. The camera, too, is a stiff thing, struggling when it needs to be fluid enough to cope with sudden changes in direction. It's hard to tell if that's just down to the fact that both tracks - Ice Cubed and Oil Be Damned - are supposed to feel slippery, or if it's another aspect of the game that is still being tuned. Handling, at the moment, is heavy and prone to oversteering. Less confident, and understandably so given how early this build is, are the core systems. There's a lowbrow pleasure to be taken in a game that offers a score bonus called Up The Arse for reversing over people and that decorates its Quit Game screen with the taunt "Return to a life where you don't get internal organs in your hair?" It may be crass and dumb, but Carmageddon commits to its Beavis and Butthead milieu fully and without apology. The gross-out adolescent tone is present and correct in the cartoonish vehicles and their various drivers: a rogue's gallery of punks, goths, dominatrices and gimps, led by leather-clad Jason Statham lookalike Max Damage, and all drawn from a 1980s teen boy's idea of what sexy and cool would look like if smashed together. Gore remains on the track, so you can often navigate by following the trails of blood. Scores extend the timer, and it's up to you which of the three goals to aim for. Victory comes from completing the alloted laps first, destroying all the other racers or killing the required number of pedestrians. You have complete freedom of movement and a countdown to beat. The game mode in question is Classic Carma, a free-for-all affair that harks back to the original. Neither of these tracks is fully finished, which means that entire textures are missing, papering large chunks of the terrain in default grid patterns, while some objects simply don't exist, appearing only as blank, blue placeholder assets.
Only one game mode is included at present, with only two tracks to play it on. This is a very early build - pre-alpha, in fact - so anyone still harbouring the notion that "early access" means "demo version" will be in for a surprise. Now available for Early Access purchase on Steam, the version of Carmageddon: Reincarnation on offer lives up the billing.
What was once forbidden fruit has become a strangely cosy nostalgia brand - but while Carmageddon may no longer be guaranteed to raise tabloid ire, that doesn't mean it's stopped being deliciously transgressive fun. Today, Carmageddon's gore-soaked take on Wacky Races seems positively quaint, its squealing guitars and brattish sensibilities no more likely to topple society than Limp Bizkit is to reinvent rock music. Back in the innocent halcyon days of the 1990s, when Mortal Kombat's crudely digitised dismemberment was enough to ruffle the feathers of the great and good, a game where you were actively encouraged to roar around in armoured vehicles, murdering pedestrians with crazed abandon, was like a red rag to a morally indignant bull. It's hard to believe that Carmageddon was once the bête noire of gaming.