Keep Death off the Streets...Drive on the Sidewalks
Written: Mar 20 '01
Product Rating:
Pros: Excellent gameplay, fun powerups, several-teen different environments, withstands the test of time
Cons: 3D acceleration options could be improved
The Bottom Line: This game is my all-time favorite, going back again and again to try to beat your score never gets old; very well rounded and a blast to play
fujisan's Full Review: Carmageddon 2: Carpocalypse Now for Windows
From the software company that brought you Redneck Rampage comes Carmageddon 2: Carpocalypse Now; the sequel to the previously released Carmageddon. Carmageddon 2 surpasses its predecessor not only in graphic quality and playability, but also in added features. As you start the game, you are driving the Eagle 3 (which anyone who played the demo of Carmageddon 2 will remember) in a city filled with everything from wandering pedestrians, to the occasional gas station, all of which you can (and are expected to) destroy. The game is divided into 10 groups of 3 races each, with one mission at the end of the three races for each group. After you have wasted all your opponents in the three races, you move on to the mission, and then on to the next group. Your objective is to waste, or destroy, all of your 8 opponents’ cars before you can move on to the next race. You don’t necessarily need to finish the race first to win; in fact, it’s really no fun to just try and finish the race: you need to KILL something!
Before I go any further, a few things must be explained about this game. Number one: this is a VERY gory game; the whole object of the game is to mangle, mutilate and mame every pedestrian you come across…the more creatively you do it, the more points you get. At first site, most people are completely appalled at the idea of just running over pedestrians and dogs, and occasionally totaling a car. I’ll admit, this was my first reaction to the game, but as soon as I started playing it, I realized that it was just about the most outstanding game I had ever played, in every respect. The rule for playing this game is to realize that it is just that: A Game; nothing more.
The scoring in the game goes as follows: you start the game out with 5,000 credits, with which you can increase your speed, armor, offensive strength, or use them later to purchase more cars. For each pedestrian you run over, you get a certain amount of credits (at least 200 credits, but it can go up much higher depending on whether or not you do it with style!) which are added to your score, along with 15 seconds of time on the clock. There are usually somewhere around 200-900 pedestrians in a level, so you have many opportunities to get credits. You also get credits for wasting your opponents (usually somewhere around 2,000 credits, which is also dependent on how much style you use when wasting them). This is where you can really rack up quite a few credits…wasting large opponents in later levels; you can acquire in excess of 90,000 credits just for wasting one large vehicle.
The thing that will really start to catch your attention is how intricately the courses you drive around are set up. A great deal of time and effort can be easily seen as you drive around each of them (there are over 10 different locations to race in, all are used at least twice for different races, but are given different sky textures each subsequent time they are used) in this game. Some of the courses include: Beaver City, Max’s Junkyard (as seen in the demo), and El Morte Desert. For those of you who have played the demo, as I had before playing the full version of this game, the demo level has been mostly left the way it was, except for the fact that all the power ups are in different places. Each course is incredibly large, with a million different places to explore, and it’s stunning to see the amount of realism this game represents.
Even with the realism being at such a high level, one of the main reasons Carmageddon 2 is such an incredible game to play is the fact that there are power ups all over the place. By powerups, I mean special abilities that you can acquire by running over different colored barrels. Among the most amusing are: the opponent repulsificator, the pedestrian flame-thrower, and the pedestrian electro-bastard ray (my personal favorite). The power ups in the game are what really make the game worth playing. With all the things they allow you to do, you can really rack up points by killing pedestrians and opponents more easily, and with more style. What you are striving for is to be able to acquire enough credits to be able to buy more cars, with different abilities, so that you can kill people faster.
This game requires a relatively fast computer to do the enormous amount of 3D rendering that the game entails. The minimum system required is a 200MHz Pentium processor with 32MB of RAM. As with any game, the minimum system requirements will not give you desirable performance, and this is especially true with Carmageddon 2. The recommended system requirements are a Pentium II 233 with 64MB of RAM. From this type of system, you’ll get decent speed, you may have to set detail down, and rendering of buildings closer than you would like, but it will run ok. Also, good 3D acceleration is a must if you want to run Carmageddon 2. At minimum, a decent AGP graphics card.
You may ask yourself after reading this review, and seeing what the game looks like, who in their right mind would play such a twisted game? Well, I think a lot of the appeal that Carmageddon 2 holds is the fact that you would never do anything in real life that Carmageddon 2 allows you to do as a game.
If you'd like to find out more about Carmageddon 2 or the folks at Interplay, visit their website at http://www.interplay.com. You can also visit the game developers' website at http://www.sci.co.uk
Epinions.com periodically updates pricing and product information from third-party sources, so some information may be slightly out-of-date. You should confirm all information before relying on it.
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.