Gas Guzzlers: Combat Carnage

I have a soft spot for combat racers, but I also have a short fuse for games that hide their best stuff behind a punishing, poorly explained opening. Gas Guzzlers: Combat Carnage does exactly that. Your first race drops you into a gutless stock car with no weapons and no upgrades against opponents in measurably better machines. Finish outside the top three and you earn nothing - not a dollar, not a single unlock. Every review that landed at launch flagged this, and nothing meaningful changed. It is a genuinely baffling design choice for a game whose whole personality is car-mounted machine guns and missiles. Once you survive that opening gauntlet, though, the actual game surfaces and it is a different animal. Three core modes fill out the career: Classic races (no weapons, on-track hazards like oil slicks and landmines), Battle races (weapons hot, full contact, the mode that earns its name), and Knockout (last driver each lap gets eliminated, brutal and chaotic). The Knockout mode in particular is worth your time if you can talk friends into a LAN session - the last-man-standing pressure with twelve weapons on the table creates real tension. On the weapon side you get machine guns, missiles, and assorted area-denial tools that actually change how you approach position on track. Turbo charges when you crash into things, which is the kind of detail the game never bothers to explain. Surface physics do vary meaningfully between dirt and asphalt, and the third-person camera angles do a solid job of conveying speed. Controls are tight once you remap them. The problem is everything surrounding the driving loop. AI recovery from weapons hits is near-instant while yours is not, which feels less like challenge and more like rubber-band coding without the rubber band. The music is looped generic rock mid-race with no real energy. Multiplayer has been a ghost town since launch - peak concurrent players today hover around two, so the online PvP, LAN deathmatches, and last-man-standing modes are functionally singleplayer exercises unless you arrive with a full crew. Netcode quality is a moot point when there is nobody on the servers. The Steam user base rates it positively at 85 percent across a small sample, and the community tends to be players who pushed through the rough opening and found the Battle and Knockout modes waiting on the other side. Critics landed around 58 on Metacritic, which is probably fair without the benefit of hindsight, though it arguably undersells how satisfying the mid-game becomes once you have a real car under you. If you are picking this up solo, treat the multiplayer modes as dead features and set your expectations for a singleplayer career grind with a good middle act and a weak start. If you have two or three friends and a LAN setup, the Knockout arena mode alone justifies the price at this tier. Fred, Scout Team