Follow The Leader

If you happen to be a fan of Carmageddon and have followed the series, you will be glad to know that even though missions are there, there is still that old Carmageddon gameplay which encompasses the basic theme of; destroy all enemy vehicles or race through all the checkpoints and or kill all pedestrians to win the race. Torus games added a lot more to destroy within the game, practically everything that a real car can break, crash and plough thorough. The cars in the game can too, everything from light posts and trees to windows and post boxes, the only thing missing is a fully destructible environment to pillage and plunder.

The pedestrians are more varied with new textures, animations and seemingly more polygons with a little twist to the usual "scream and try to run away" A.I., meaning that now pedestrians are bold enough to try their hand at wrecking your car with pipes, moltova cocktails, and bombs. The only problem with gameplay is that game ships with zombies instead of human pedestrians which is just inconvenient as the whole of the game was changed to fit the zombie presence, which includes the addition of a Carmageddon 1 type of story where a single driver (you, the player) have to escape a radioactive wasteland to a paradise dome through the races. In essence it's all for the good for the kiddies but bad to the mature players who unless they have access to the Internet (to download a blood patch), cannot play the full-uncensored game if desired. This censorship is quit frankly a farce, any kid with a 56k modem can quickly download the blood patch through the website anyways, so what exactly does this censorship achieve?

"Car Owners are a danger to Society" - Circa 19th Century

Progression in Carmageddon is handle through races as usual, but as mention earlier Torus added missions to keep the things fresh, and as again mentioned above it doesn't work too well. The missions are actually a good idea, but too bad they were made with some feeling of hastiness and really lack balancing in terms of challenge and of the ever-elusive "fun" factor. First and foremost the missions are often to hard or too bloody easy, 2 missions into the game you get what seems to be a an unconquerable mission and then right after you have the equivalent of Grade 1 math puzzles. To the backdrop of these missions the original racing action of Carmageddon, which appears in between levels and missions, really seems to be out of place and order.

Thankfully the game can be played via an "Instant Race" mode where the player can set different parameters such as race time, pedestrian count, enemy count and police (who try to stop you) count to race again on a backdrop to all of the games areas, this is a saving grace for a game which would have been ridiculously boring with it's so called "mission storyline".

During the game you can also upgrade your car, through upgrade slots in such areas as Amour, Power, and Offensive. These all have to be bought by way of credits which you earn in game through the slaughter and demolition of both pedestrians and enemies (yummy), you also receive bonuses for pulling off wacky stunts. There are numerous power ups to be gained through the game, which can be used against enemies and, as always, pedestrians. These include flamethrowers, bomb like projectiles, lightning ability, oil slicks, kangaroo on command and much more. The player can also can obtain new vehicles by first wrecking it on races and then after the race purchasing it for an amount of credits.

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