Carmageddon II: Carpocalypse Now - Review

Author: Vlakey Date: Nov 12 2004 - 15:53 Score: 60 points

Introduction:
This is a sequel to one of the most controversial games ever, the infamous "Carmageddon", and it maintains the tradition of an extremely gory, but also an extremely fun game. It puts you in the driver's seat of one of the cars in the racing events of post-apocalyptic surroundings. Race through the laps, wreck your competition, run over the pedestrians on the sidewalks... the choice is yours!

Features:
Carmageddon II features a total of 40 cars you can drive, and 10 completely new tracks, which are spread into 30 races and 10 missions. Among the new cars are also 7 new-and-improved versions of some cars from the first game, as well as some really weird vehicles (you'll see what I mean when you play it). Physics were pretty realistic in the first game, but now they're even better, especially the damage system. Among the standard deformations cars go through in the crashes, now you can bend your car, or even split it in two (which is game-over, instantly). The tracks have the same laws as in the first game: you can go wherever the hell you want to go, no invisible walls on the side of the road here. However, if you want to finish a level instead of roaming around, you are given 3 choices: you can finish all the laps (easy, but requires a lot of patience in the later levels), wreck all the other racers (easy, it will be your most frequent choice), or kill all the pedestrians on that level (very hard).

Graphics:
Although a bit outdated by today's standards, it was a major improvement over the first game, and looked pretty damn good in it's time. Besides the software mode (ugly, 320x240 only), there are two more modes (both in 640x480): 3dfx Glide (Looks better, but is not available unless you own a voodoo chipset graphics card, which is a rarity nowadays), and Direct3D (not as good as 3dfx Glide, but satisfying). The biggest improvement graphically seem to be the pedestrians (which are animated 3d objects, as opposed to flat moving sprites from the first game), but everything else, and especially the cars, are much more detailed, and more pleasant to watch.

Sound & Music:
Driving sounds in this game are not top of the bunch, but are satisfying... a few vehicles could've really had a better engine sound, but most of them are not bad at all, especially the vehicles with huge diesel engines. The constant screaming of pedestrians sounds fun at first, but after a lot of playing, it can become annoying. As far as music goes, the soundtrack is made of Iron Maiden songs, which fits perfectly into this game in my opinion.

Gameplay:
This is one of a few games that had me playing it constantly for nearly a year. I think that speaks for itself pretty much. Whether you're racing, wrecking, or running over people, this game is just so much FUN.

Conclusion:
In case you can, get your hands on a full cd version, because this demo seems to be from an early stage of development, the final version of the game looks and plays much better... but if you want to see what it's like, this demo will pretty much give you the idea.

A few tips:
If you're wondering what cars you should buy first when you gather some money, here's an advice: if you're more into racing I'd recommend "Purple Piledriver" (it is one of the fastest vehicles in the game, and it handles pretty well), and if you're into crashing and wrecking other vehicles I'd recommend "The Plow mk2" (but since it's not available until later in the game, "Thunderbucket" will do just fine). If you finish the game, and you're bored with the car selection, you can browse the net for some add-on cars. There is a huge selection, and there is hardly any car you can think of that hasn't been made by someone. If you'd like some really awesome cars try finding ones made by AdR. You will need a program called "Carstockalypse" for installing add-on cars (it can still be found on various places over the net), and it can be useful for tweaking the game (the first time you run it, it unpacks all the game parameter files into .txt files, so you can edit them as you wish).

	Title / Type	Submitter	Date
	Review	Vlakey	Nov 12 2004

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