Carmageddon: Reincarnation Review

Intro

Some of you may remember the name "Carmageddon". An old game released in 1997.

After having a few other titles, the franchise has pretty much been forgotten, up until 2015 when a new sequel "Carmageddon: Reincarnation" has been released.

Carmageddon: Reincarnation is simply said: An arcade vehicular combat game. Though without guns! This game only focuses on ramming your oponnent to death, or the use of power-ups that you can find across the map.

At first glimpse, it doesn't look like anything mind-blowing, especially for a game of 2015. Most likely, only old Carmageddon fans will recognize the car and HUD style.

The gameplay is where this game really shines, especially with the recent releases patch that fixed a lot of optimalisation issues with the game, making the gameplay fun again, instead of having to worry about your 20fps.

Inside The Game

This game is basically an open playground for road carnage. Given you an option of 2 different cars at the beginning of the game,  However, there are a total of 24 unique cars to collect in the game,  which you will have to steal from your oponnent by ramming them to death.

There are three main game modes that you will play in Career Mode:

Classic Carma:

This is the same gamemode as in the previous Carmageddon games: You get thrown into an open map, on which a racetrack is pinpointed on the map, made from checkpoints.

On this map you will find a number of things:

• Your oponnents (You'll want to watch your rear!)
• Pedestrians (Run them over for points!)
• Power-ups (They will help you...! Or not....)
• Cops! (Now those are a real pain in the rear!)
• Checkpoints (Self explanatory)

You will have 3 options to win the race:

1.  Race through all the checkpoints and complete the race. (The boring way)
2.  Wreck all your oponnents in the race (The right way to play this game)
3.  Run over every single pedestrian on the map. (The challenging way, since these can be a few hundred)

Now obviously you'll want to wreck all your oponnents and watch out for the police cars trying to stop you. And to help you with this, you can use all kinds of power-ups that you can find scattered across the map. These power-ups are pretty much chosen by random, and can range to a temporary increased damage buff, invulnerability, an ability to fart out mines, freezing your oponnent, making your car bounce on command, ability to drive on walls, make your car out of solid granite, speed boosts, a giant spiked ball behind your car, mortars, bodypart vacuums, and not limited to an ability to shoot anvils at your oponnents! The amount of power-ups is pretty large, since there are tons more power-ups available.

But these power "ups" will not always help you. Sometimes it might give you a negative effect, not limited to turning your car into a banana....

I'm not joking, here, take a look!

Before:

After:

(Well, I actually took the first screenshot after repairing my car, but you get the idea)

So basically, every "power up" you might end up picking up, might just yet give you a big suprise! So it's mostly a small gamble to grab them, but they are so worth the laugh!

Also, one more thing: Be sure to keep your timer from going to 0 by running over pedestrians and gathering time bonuses by causing chaos across the map!

Ped Chase

In this game mode all cars get assigned a target pedestrian to run over. First one killing them gets a point. First person to get 10 points wins. If you wreck an oponnent, you will steal one of his points!

Other than that, there are no differences.

Checkpoint Stampede

Basically Ped Chase, but instead of having to run over pedestrians for a point, you need to be the first to reach a certain random checkpoint on the map.

Multiplayer

Multiplayer is available, but pretty much noone is playing, so I have not been able to try it out. A big shame to be honest, ramming eachother in spiked and bladed vehicles in an online match seems so much fun!

Customization

Limited, but still there! The game offers a different choice of colors for every vehicle, plus a special unlockable skin and set of rims for every single vehicle in the game.

This is obviously not very detailed, but the cars look awesome either way, so only being able to change your basic color, or color combination is enough for me, since the cars in this game already look very unique and awesome.

Other than that, there are only 3 upgradable categories for each individual car: Damage, Armor and Speed.

To upgrade these three things, you basically need to spend tokens that you can randomly find across the maps you play in.

Final info

Now since this is a combat racer, there is a big amount of damage your car can take. As seen in the "banana screenshot" above, you can see the car got bended into the shape of a banana. Every car can basically bend in every single way, and every part of the car can get rammed off your vehicle, if rammed right.

The cars feel strong, yet voulnerable. The handling takes a lot to get used to and is a bit drifty, but this is obviously done on purpose.

I can safely say that the damage the cars get in this game is one of the best ones i've seen so far in video games. Almost like in real life, there are so many parts flying off your car when you get a good ram from an oponnent.

A few examples of the damage:

Great Soundtrack

This game also has some great soundtrack, fitted very well to the vehicular carnage.

Consisting mostly of different Metal and Electronic songs, giving a great feel of destruction and exploration. This was also the case in the first Carmageddon game.

Over all

A great game for the people that just want some good vehicular combat and release the beast from inside! Drive around, cause chaos, make it bloody and messy, destroy your oponnents and have some good old fun as you laugh at the silly moments this game has to offer!

Pros

• Awesome car damage
• A ton of funny power-ups
• Great soundtrack
• Very satisfying to ram your oponnents to death
• Full controller support

Cons

• Graphics aren't anyting special for a 2015 game.
• This game will mostly only attract oldschool fans with nostalgia from the original Carmageddon
• The game wasn't fully optimized, but has recieved a patch that optimized the game way more, but still the max fps I get are around 45fps instead of a solid 60+ that I would want. (On Max Settings)
• Dead multiplayer