Road Rage Meets Pedestrians
Carmageddon 2 is based on the concept of car combat and racing. Instead of fancy gold coins or boxes filled with bananas (ie: Mario Kart), you run over pedestrians for score and hit boxes filled with bombs, oil slicks, drugs, and ped zappers. Even though this is a racing game, I don't think I've ever actually won a race by racing. The game is more of a what if Mortal Kombat was based with cars as characters to me. All you really need to do is ram other cars until they die in this death race.
The graphics aren't a masterpiece, and I don't even think they were really impressive when this game came out. However, what is impressive is teh fact that the maps are huge, there's a ton of pedestrians on screen at once, they cars break apart in a some-what realistic manner, and there's more exploring to do than you would think. For instance, one level pits you in a circus with a roller coaster. I had more fun trying to race on the roller coaster track and do the super jumps at the end than even playing the game. I was actually stuck on this level for days because the level is so fun. Plus, when you get board, you can break into the zoo portion of the level and run over penguins, employees, and even elephants! Yes, exploding elephants (after heavily damaging your car) is incredibad.
The sounds are meh. They're not The best in the world, however, the soundtrack features Iron Maiden, so it's pretty balanced. I'd say the worth thing about the sounds is the lack of variety in screams and tire sounds. You'll hear the same sounds for the tires and wrecks over and over. Then again, this is a CD-Rom game so they couldn't jam-pack the disc with good quality sound variety and textures.
Another thing that will keep you coming back is the huge list of people supporting the game with new vehicles (including on some sites, the Scooby-Doo van, a Porche, or even the Flintstone's car!). The lasting appeal is there with tons of secrets through the nice list of levels. Each level is unique and doesn't just repeat. Plus, killing people means you get to buy their cars, and there's a good chunk of cars in the game. There is multiplayer, but I'm sure it would be hard to find a match unless using GameSpy's servers.