It's not often I come across a game that I can put hours into at a time, but this game is really fun because it's so tough to master. Playing through the Arcade Mode is a blast, even when I lose my cool from losing in the same area several times. The idea of using a Battle Mode to make this beat'em up double as a fighting game is pure genius in my opinion, and it was actually the thing I was looking forward to the most. After having played the Battle Mode though I can see that there is much room for improvement. I've listed a bunch of ideas in a video I made, since they wouldn't all fit in this review. Hopefully there's a chance it can be improved in the future, because it has a lot of potential. Link to video: https://youtu.be/lceQXw56cMo
Cars suffer from a severe case of understeering; just trying to deviate a little to the left or to the right so you can drive into a pedestrian, an opponent, or a power-up is oftentimes too much for the car to handle. It's frustrating having the understeer make me miss a power-up or cheat me out of a kill, especially in situations where I give myself a fair amount of time to aim at what I was trying to drive into even while accelerating. I should mention that the AI generally has a much easier time handling their vehicles when it counts. Smaller problem I personally have: some of the game's modes need improvements. The best mode in my opinion is one where you and your opponents race around the map trying to get to randomly generated checkpoints that appear one at a time. The first player to reach a checkpoint gets a point, and the first player to get a certain amount of points wins. An unnecessarily similar mode to this has you kill randomly chosen pedestrians on the map instead. There are plenty of pedestrians to kill in every map you race in (the first map alone has 700+), so why wasn't the objective for this mode simply to kill as many of them as possible in a certain time limit, with the player who kills the most winning? The classic mode which lets you choose between completing a certain number of laps, being the last driver standing, or killing all of the pedestrians on the map to win is also flawed; you're asked to kill too many pedestrians and you're not required to complete a lot of laps to win, so finishing laps is almost always the best choice, which takes away from having the freedom to choose how you want to win in this mode. I hope production for Carmageddon games continues and is improved upon because the variety of different ways to play can make it a huge success. But the terrible handling in this latest version of the game alone will drive you insane (no pun intended).
