So, I've been playing all the Carmageddon games after about 20 years since I played the second game, the only one I had familiarity with. So here's a tl;dr post about it.
The
first game has the best core gameplay and aesthetics. By core gameplay, I mean that it's the one where running down people and crashing into other cars is the most satisfying. Unlike later games, peds are basically sprites that blow up when you touch them. While you can't play around with them as in Carma 2, it's more rewarding of stylish driving where you don't nencessarily hit peds full force but rather mow them down using all parts of your vehicle. More importantly, peds are often positioned in large clusters just begging you to spin or powerslide into them.
As for the the graphics, they hold up to this day. The cars have good models and deformation (remember this is a 1997 game), peds' animations, particularly as they splatter their organs all over your screen are very fun and original, and the tracks are large, diverse and interesting with plenty of secrets to discover. Exploration is rewarded in all but the Hard difficulty mode, which punishes you too much for losing time and using the recovery button (if you've never played Carmageddon, you can fix your car on the fly or set it right again if you land on your back, which will happen a lot if you explore). It's easy to forget how impressive it must've been to see your car turn into a deformed rust bucket and then slowly restore it back to normal with the press of a button back in 1997.
The handling of cars is very similar in all of the games and it takes a bit to get used to. Controlling your car as goes past 60 mph is extremely difficult, but you'll spend most of your time doing U-turns and driving kamikaze into a ramp or another vehicle, so for that purpose it works. Still, I think that the handling of most other vehicles other than the Eagle and the Hawk, your starting choices, lacks some optimization in the first game and for the most part I don't find them fun to drive.
This is different in the expansion, the
Splat Pack, which has a lot more interesting choices for vehicles and I found them to handle a bit better. The Splat Pack is a worthy expansion, due to the number of new vehicles it introduces and several new tracks. The tracks vary in quality, but some are just as amazing as in the original and they tend to have large concentrations of peds for added customer satisfaction. I've only dipped my toes into the expansion proper, as
I'd rather use the Meldpack, which seamlessly integrates main game and the expansion and straight out of Windows at that. I'd also recommend the
Windows Restoration Project to run the original game and expansion, as it helped me with frame rate issues and crashes I was having in DosBox.
A word about the soundtrack, containing several instrumental tracks from Fear Factory's Demanufacture. While I'm not a huge fan of the band, nothing goes better with Carmageddon's mechanized mayhem than this. The second game's Iron Maiden soundtrack doesn't fit nearly as well to this kind of game.
Moving on to
Carmageddon 2, one of my adolescent obsessions. In all fairness, there are several things it does better than the first game. the damage models are much improved, now including detachable parts that fly out when you crash into things; peds are now fully 3D, which means you can do stuff like push them over ledges and send them flying into air, sometimes into other peds; the environment is a lot more interactable with breaking glass and props like traffic vehicles, trains and even airplanes you can crash into or send absurdly flying while in Pinball mode; there are more vehicles to choose from, they have great designs and handle better than in the first game, and you can also have more opponents in the same race. The maps are still pretty good and reward exploration to a even greater level than the original.
In other ways the gameplay has suffered. While the selection of lighter vehicles is great, you'll struggle to get the bonuses from running over peds as they're likely to get up unless you hit them full force. The peds are also placed more randomly throughout the map, instead of clustered like the first game, with less opportunities for driving feats where you crash into +5 peds at once. I've also found it more difficult to get special bonus like Extra Syle, compared to the first game. The game is made much easier due to the Player activated power ups, which are often a great idea but give you an "I win" button after lining up against the opponent. Opponents are generally more fragile, as while before the most effective way to destroy them was by a head on collision at high speed, now you can rather easily piledrive them against a wall for massive damage. Their position is also persistent throughout the map, instead of spawning near you like in the first game. This is good in principle, but the AI is so stupid it will get stuck at the bottom of a lake or even blow itself up with mines.
While the first game hit the right spot between sadism and silliness, the second game is perhaps too much on the silly scale. The gritty atmosphere of the scenarios is replaced with a lighter one, peds are given a lot of additional funny conditions like "big heads" and "stick figures", the interface is brightly colored and, as mentioned before, the soundtrack lacks an appropriate tone compared to the first.
Oh yeah, and there are the missions. I still have PTSD from those. Now, every 3 scenarios you're forced to pass a mission. While the rest of the game is all about non-committal fun, here you're forced to do very specific things while relying on luck and borderline exploitation of mechanics. Just use a cheat, like timer freeze, and "enjoy" them at your leisure is my only advice.
All in all, a great game, but nostalgia wasn't enough to make me see the first game is still slightly better.
Let's not talk about TDR. I decided to skip to
Carmageddon Max Damage right after the second game. This was Stainless's long postponed effort to copy their own game, which they managed to do to some extent. In its favor, together with your shiny graphics you still have your trademark large exploratory tracks, the diversity of scenarios, the absurd sadism, etc. For the first time, they managed to make the AI cars actually race, although this is only likely to happen in the dedicated racing scenarios. There's more variety to gameplay modes, with racing and other modes where you have to accumulate points by hunting certain peds or chasing random checkpoints, or steal those same points from your opponents by wasting them.
This is all quite nice, but what about the core gameplay? Here my expectations deflated like a balloon, as I found out that the game now discourages you from crashing into other cars. Now even a modest hit against your rear bumper will waste you. Meanwhile, wasting other cars has been made extremely difficult and costly to yourself unless you use powerups such as the anvil launcher, in which case it's very easy. So basically the game consists of hoarding powerups and using them to nuke your adversaries opportunistically. Peds retain the Carma 2 problem of being difficult to waste in light vehicles and I wasn't able to get an Extra Style bonus by sliding into them. While the tracks seem good enough (I've only played 3 scenarios), they have too much of a theme park feel for my taste (why ramps and other stunt props in a city centre?). The OST is forgettable and the art (in character portraits for example) is definitely lower quality than before.
All in all, it's an entertaining game and I paid about 5€ for it, so I'm not complaining. It's a sincere effort, I just don't believe it lives up to the Carmageddon name. If you have the Steam version, you may be interested in the
Experimental Beta Patch, which was an attempt by a lone developer to fix some of the most glaring issues using fan input, as well as the amateur mod that depends on it,
STShotgun's C-MD Overhaul. From what I read, this would make the game worth playing for me. I haven't tried it since I don't have Steam.
is about the right score.
