To be fair to Stainless, reincarnating Carmageddon was never about instigating wholesale change or deepening its strangely unapocalyptic post-apocalyptic world, only to bring the look and feel of the original games in line with modern PC capabilities. Many of Carmageddon's old locations and tracks have been reconstructed, thankfully with a degree of familiarity that, as with a new Mario Kart, breeds more contentment that one would like to admit. Compared to the world of adventure that is Los Santos, playing Carmageddon: Reincarnation is like a municipal playground tour, albeit one that allows for plenty of sociopathic mayhem at each stop. The most recent iterations of Just Cause, Far Cry and Grand Theft Auto all come with advanced vehicular manslaughter fitted as standard, but they are celebrated more for worlds that are coherent and developed enough to put context and consequence to a whole range of players actions and objectives, not just running people over for the fun of it.Ĭarmageddon: Reincarnation, a reboot from the original developers Stainless Games, has locations that provide for circuits of big dumb fun, but it's not a particularly cohesive world, nor one that has much to offer those that stray too far from the blood-stained track. More significantly in the context of Carma's 15 year absence, the concept of the vehicle-as-weapon is now so evolved and so commonplace as to be secondary to the immersiveness of the game worlds they occupy. These days we expect a game's ability to display impairment to be not just realistic but applied universally, whether it's as a result of a collision between a vehicle and a building, or a bullet and a human skull - and if we can get a lingering slow motion repeat and some kind of award to go with it, so much the better.
Back then, damage modelling in your typical racing game involved slapping a few scuffs on the paintwork and maybe a crack in the windshield, while the idea of aiming your car at helpless screaming bystanders and having their viscera sprayed at the screen in exchange for added time was seemingly - if the brief period of tabloid hysteria was anything to go by - beyond all common decency. Much has changed since Carmageddon first crashed onto the scene in the spring of 1997.