Carmageddon 2: Carpocalypse Now

My baseline test for any racing game is pretty simple: does it make me grin within the first thirty seconds? Carmageddon 2 had me grinning in about ten, mostly because the very first thing I did was ignore the checkpoint route entirely and go hunting. That tells you everything about what this game is and who it is for. The structure is straightforward but smart. Each group of levels gives you three races where you can win in any of three ways: complete the laps through checkpoints, wreck every opposing car, or hunt down every pedestrian on the map. The checkpoint route is the least interesting and the most stressful given the time limits. Wrecking all opponents is genuinely the most enjoyable path, and the physics model behind those collisions still has personality that a lot of modern vehicular combat games lack. Cars crumple, bend, and can actually be sheared in half mid-race, which was genuinely wild for 1998 and still reads as satisfying today. After every race you can spend credits on Armour, Power, and Offense upgrades in the Parts Shop, and you can swap into any car you have wrecked and claimed, giving the campaign a light progression loop that keeps things ticking. Every fourth stage in a group is a dedicated mission - things like jumping rooftop to rooftop or hunting specific targets across open maps - and you cannot advance until you clear it. That gate mechanic is where some players hit a wall, because mission design ranges from silly-fun to genuinely irritating. The roster sits at 40 drivers, each with their own vehicle personality, and the power-up selection runs to 90 items including some absolute chaos grenades like the Electro Bastard Ray. Cop Cars also patrol certain levels and pile on if you provoke them, with a single capturable Super Squad Car hiding in one stage as a bonus prize. The open-ended track design means there is usually a hidden area or shortcut worth finding, and an Action Replay with multiple camera angles lets you rewatch the best carnage. On the sound side, the game ships with a heavy metal soundtrack that includes original Iron Maiden tracks, which lands exactly as well as you would hope. Now the honest caveats. Key rebinding is fiddly and WASD is not natively supported, which is a genuine nuisance on a modern setup. There is no split-screen or couch co-op, so the "fun for four friends" test fails here - multiplayer was LAN or IPX-only back in 1998 and that is not something the Steam re-release magics away. The pedestrian-kill win condition sounds like the most chaotic option but is actually tedious in practice because targets can number in the hundreds across large open areas. And while the vehicular physics still feel punchy, the overall visual presentation is late-90s PC in ways that DOSBox-era fans will shrug at but newcomers should know going in. Controls also feel loose in a way that a racing wheel or even a modern gamepad layout does not really fix - this was built for a keyboard and it shows. For the right person - someone who played the original, or who wants to understand why late-90s PC gaming had a particular brand of no-apologies weirdness - Carpocalypse Now holds up as a solo experience with genuine replay value in its upgrade loop and vehicle collection. It is not an approachable casual pick, and it is definitely not a Saturday-night party racer. It is a deliberately mean, funny, mechanically rough time capsule that knows exactly what it is.

Riley · Scout Team

Sports & racing

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