Reply To: First impressions

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#5097

I’ve been working away at this all month, very nearly beaten the game now. It’s been a fun one to revisit and held up surprisingly well. Some of the mechanics feel kind of broken though and I have some gripes. I’ve stuck with normal difficulty the whole way and aspects of the game that should have added depth just don’t work. The car part upgrades appear to become available with rank but every time new parts become available, I’ve already enough cash to buy all of them so the choice of what to buy is meaningless. Cash maxes out at 999,999 and I’ve reached that long before I have anything to spend it on.

Similarly, there is some mechanic where you get to drive your opponents cars by occasionally stealing them when taking them out during a race. Not sure if this is simply random but I’ve made it to the end of the game without getting a car I could seriously consider over the default. I only ever seem to get the underpowered ones making that aspect of the game almost worthless also. I’d love to have driven the bulldozer around or the car with the pedestrian zapping ray built in.

I’ve also noticed that the game is cheating heavily with the opponents. As soon as they get a small distance away from you on the map, it’s clearly not tracking what they are doing in any meaningful way, they aren’t taking out pedestrians, they can go through walls, etc.. They literally warp around the map – it doesn’t matter if they were upside down with no possible escape last time you saw them. I’ve needed a basic understanding of these quirks to make it through the later levels.

All of this is kind of understandable but there was definitely improvement to be made in Carmageddon 2. This game has been huge though, no way I’m going on to the sequel right now. It’s easily been the most time I’ve put into any DGC game to finish it. Despite that I’ve not gotten bored. The new levels, powerups and opponents just keep on coming. I do notice that most of the levels are effectively variants of each other – a new course on the same map. The maps are so huge I’ve been fine with this. I can see why Carmageddon got all the praise it did at the time – it’s almost a classic and still loads of fun but going back to it now I expect even its own sequel made this first game somewhat obsolete. Still not tried the new Carmageddon that got released within the last few years, might have to give that a go some time.