Carmageddon: Max Damage Review

I was always taught that if you don't have anything nice to say then you shouldn't say anything, in which case this would be a very short review and although this isn't the worst game I have ever played it is in my list of the top ten.

There are three game modes, Career, Freeplay and Multiplayer. The career mode contains sixteen stages all with multiple races within them set in different locations. There is a choice of two cars to start with and over 30 to unlock all together. These are unlocked by wrecking a selected enemy within a race.

There are 3 ways to win a race- wipe out the competition, mow down all the pedestrians in the level or complete the checkpoint race. Killing pedestrians awards you with more time thus allowing you to explore the open levels, but the exploration is tedious due to the car handling. Trying to drive along a narrow walkway slowly so you can pick up an unlock token when your car has only 2 speeds aka stop and full throttle is very annoying. 

As you explore you are rewarded with powerups and unlock tokens. The powerups can be fun and I was amused at throwing anvils from my car at the other racers as well as some of the others but there is a risk/ reward aspect as the powerups are random and you may pick up a power down or a powerup that affects the pedestrians. The unlock tokens allow you to upgrade your vehicle but these unlocks are unlocked as you play through the campaign and vehicles are upgraded separately so you can't transfer upgrades from one to another.

The Graphics are rough and to be honest I have seen better looking original Xbox games from 10 years ago e.g. Black which whilst not a racing game just shows how bad the graphics in this game are.

The A.I.s all seem to act the same and just charge in, there's no difference between the other drivers. It would have been nice to have different drivers attempt to win the race in different ways e.g. some aggressive whilst others go for pedestrians to add variety to the races, for example, during one of my races I witnessed an A.I. driver just constantly driving round in circles oblivious to everything around him and even a few small taps from myself wouldn't knock him out of the loop.

The game supports up to 6 players over Xbox Live but to try and keep the frame rate up the developers removed one of the more appealing features of the game, namely the pedestrians which I feel ruins the multiplayer experience.

My main problem with this game was the fact that all the vehicles handled like a charging rhino, even the sports cars had problems trying to turn a simple corner and a slight tap of the handbrake sent you spinning round in repeating circles.

All of the above points make this an overpriced (£29.99 rrp), repetitive, below average title that I wouldn't be able to recommend to anyone except to use as a form of torture as an alternative to waterboarding.