This game takes the worst elements of the series, removes the best, and gives you a useless husk of a marketing gimmick.
I believe in pointing out the good before pointing out the bad so allow me to continue.
I have always had a soft spot for the Carmageddon series. Since it’s inception I’ve labeled it as a “guilty pleasure”. It was always just kind of fun to roll around a post-apocalyptic cityscape smashing rival racers and pedestrians. It’s always been fun to kill with the near invincibility this series has afforded the player.
I was never too crazy about the vehicle physics and they really put me off in the last two games. The cars were very, very floaty and it was more like racing around a series of boats than different cars. It didn’t matter which car you took. The handling between vehicles merely ranged from insanely difficult to totally impossible. However, TDR 2000 managed to fix that and made the vehicle physics tolerable enough to play the game.
With that in mind you’re probably asking “Well then, Nyralathotep, what in the hell is so bad about this game?” I’ll tell you: They somehow managed to take all the fun out of the smashing, crashing, and killing…even with the improved physics.
First off, in the first two games smashing opponents and pedestrians would net absurdly high bonuses both in time and in points. Bonus time was added to the in-game timer which was constantly on a steady course to zero. However, smashing a few opponents and mowing down the game’s acres and acres of pedestrians or even blowing through check points (but seriously, no one plays Carmageddon simply for the racing) would net whopping time bonuses often resulting in the timer seeming to stick at 99:99. It would just keep adding time and therefore never get anywhere near zero. You could play any one level for an almost infinite amount of time. However, the game did offer up one “mission based exploration challenge” for every three racing levels in a given location. These were fairly annoying attempts in Carmageddon 2 to add some depth to a very shallow game. You were charged with what was essentially nothing more than a trumped up version of the game’s check point racing system with objectives ranging from merely races with no opponents where check point crossing was mandatory to “destroy Item A, then B, then C, etc, etc.”. However, the game’s always frustrating physics made it almost impossible to complete these tasks. You would often over shoot your mark or end up having to salvage your vehicle multiple times before you could hit the check point.
TDR 2000 does away with the oodles of time feature. No matter how much you smash, including grabbing actual time bonuses, the timer will never exceed 4 minutes. Even in the normal races you only have a maximum of 4 minutes, and no bonus time. You can keep resetting it using the methods mentioned before but they also curbed the bonuses to adhere to this lower time. For example if you have 3:38 left to go you can only earn a maximum time bonus of :22. They even toughened up the pedestrians so to kill any of them you have to either push them into water, off a cliff, or run over them at an absurdly high rate of speed. Smashing peds and opponents often nets you a bonus of less than 10 seconds. Once again, mutilating peds in the almost laughably timed mission races nets no bonus at all. As for the driving the only real improvement is the physics. Even they seem a little glitchy now but at the time they were excellent, for the series especially. However in exchange for the physics we are given the worst, most frustrating elements of the series and left to wonder what Xicat was doing wrong. The frustratingly timed missions are now presented as every other race, sometimes twice to 3 times in a row.
Even the menu interfaces are strange, and at times even a little awkward. Any time you do anything it nets a typed reaction from what I can only assume is the computer whose console the menu interface wishes to represent. Every time you buy a car you get a message that says “Arrrrr….she’s a beauty”. Apparently you’re buying cars from Patchy the freaking Pirate. It’s frustrating at times, especially when you just want to buy the car and move on. The only real improvement to the Garage Management system is that you no longer have to seek out and add extra armor, offensive, and power slots and points to the vehicle in each level. They are freely available to purchase in the garage menu. However, even this is kind of annoying because clicking to add a slot or fill one nets a “Extra Blah slot/point costs Blah credits” message with an “OK or Cancel” button. Also, the extra points are not for one car. Buying them adds them to your profile so regardless of what car you’re using you always have the points at hand. The game also maintains the Car Buying interface. You cannot buy any car you didn’t waste during the previous race. This keeps you slightly handicapped at all times by making you use “obsolete“ vehicles. Once again, they strip out the good stuff and keep or replace it with crap.
The play controls are OK but even they get a little frustrating. During game play you often get your car wedged under both active and dead opponents, hung on the environment, or otherwise stuck. You then have to be recovered at a steep cost of credits to you. Even then it doesn’t always work right. Occasionally a recovery will have seemingly no effect and you will find yourself still stranded despite having lost the 20,000 credit points to pay for it. Collision detection seems kind of whacky, too. Smashing headlong into an opposing racer or cop and knocking off all the body work and twisting the frame will inflict no damage to the car outside of the aesthetics. Then backing away from them you bump them at a low rate of speed or drive them into the wall at an equally slow rate and their health takes a 20-50% nose dive. Occasionally at high speeds there’s a delay between the hit, recoil, and damage. It will seem to almost pause the two cars in mid hit while the graphics engine plays “catch-up” to generate the recoil and the damage. Also, with the damage you can find your car hung up and useless on a simple piece of opponent’s body work. This is just another nail in the coffin.
Also the graphics in this game are HIDEOUS, even by the standards of the time. They work to set a mood by making everything gritty, dirty, and just generally unclean to the eye. However, the bad car detailing, card board cut-out style pedestrians, and the generally blurry, lack luster details of the racing world made the game look out of date even when it was new. It is a real low point in the game. They tried to make everything look better than the mish-mashed, mismatched, hodgepodge of pastel colored monster polygons of the previous games but the car designs still look very rushed and amateur-ish. Wheel covers are often two dimensional blobs of color, and attempts at shading certain polygons in the body to create the illusion of depth just make for an experience for your eyes that’s less than enjoyable. Kind of like the rest of the game is to the rest of your senses.
Then we move on to the sound. This is a painful low point. Pedestrians yell things at you, other drivers yell things at you, and then you have the spare motorists just putting around each and every race track seemingly totally oblivious to you, your fellow racers, the cops, the environment, or anything else for that matter. Smashing one of them makes them hit the horn as it dies out generating a horrid sort of honking noise that cuts right through everything. Add to that a few pedestrians, cop cars, and fellow racers yelling random phrases at you and you get a god-awful cacophony which makes you want to play the game in mute. The soundtrack is equally unimpressive, borrowing heavily from some severely ef’ed up scores that grate on the nerves as much as the game noises you can find no solace from the headaches here. Occasionally the engine noise is drowned out or begins to stutter and crack like it’s coming through a blown speaker. This is just a side-effect of the game not being able to process and separate the effects from each other. That now makes the game unpleasant to play, watch being played, or hear being played. That’s pretty much everything you could ever do with a video game.
To wrap up this rather lengthy bash-fest I will say this:
SCI seemed to do nothing but learn the WRONG lessons from every Carmageddon game up to this point. Each of the sequels is of lesser quality than it’s predecessor. Part 3 is merely the culmination of learning the wrong lessons twice in a row. I don’t understand how a series with this much promise could go so badly, so quickly. I don’t know who was truly calling the shots when they decided what stayed from old to new but whoever it is has now obviously lost their job and for damn good reasons. They repaired the vehicle physics which was the game’s Achilles’ Heel but they simply added more fatal flaws on top of it. Even with the option to play the “race and smash” levels on your own, free of time limit in Free Ride mode, I cannot recommend this game to anyone other than the select few Carmageddon fan boys who will buy it regardless of the game itself because of their blinding, almost religious devotion to the series. Sorry fellas.