Carmageddon: Rogue Shift

I really wanted to like Carmageddon: Rogue Shift. I love Redout II and recommend it without hesitation, so seeing the same developer take on Carmageddon should have been an easy sell. I held off because the reviews were mixed, eventually bought it to judge it for myself, and unfortunately the reviews were not wrong. This game is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. Rogue Shift is not Carmageddon reimagined. It is a single-player roguelite combat racer using the Carmageddon name. The originals gave you open areas and three ways to win: finish the race, wreck every opponent or wipe out every pedestrian. Here you follow linear tracks, shoot other cars, drive through zombies, fight a boss and repeat. The zombies are not automatically the problem. Some censored versions of the older games used them as well, and the developer said they wanted to avoid boredom because running over polygonal people no longer carried the same shock value. Fair enough. The zombies here are still boring. They are generic obstacles you drive through for boost while most of the stupidity and personality that made Carmageddon memorable has disappeared. The campaign map presents branching routes, but most choices are betw…

Played an hour and got a refund. This is not Carmageddon. This is nothing like the old Carmageddon games. This is a game made capitalizing on the reputation of the classic Carma games. Anyone who has ever played any of the Carmageddon games in the past, like I have, will be severely disappointed in this one. Had this been named otherwise and promoted as a new combat racing game, it may be doing better in the review department. But since this is nothing but a cash grab using a well known classic name, it is failing miserably. For those that don't know, the original Carmageddon games were an open-ish world "race" combat game. You had three ways to win a level. Complete the race, destroy all the peds (pedestrians, or humans. Or for those who were easily offended back then, they were patched into zombies) or destroy all the opponents. There was no time limit, there was no set goal other than to race or destroy, and there was no forced path. If you wanted to race, you follow the race path. Most of us would go the destruction path though. Hunt down every other opponent and ram them until they were destroyed, or you were. There were no real weapons short of a few you could p…

There are bad games, and then there are games that feel like you’ve arrived somewhere after the good times ended, the bars have shut, the locals have left, and someone is still selling postcards of what the place used to be. This game is both. A mediocre game, and an insult to what the name once meant. It wears the Carmageddon name in the same way a derelict seaside hotel might keep a faded five-star sign above the entrance: not because it still deserves it, but because somebody hopes you’ll remember better days. Calling it a “spin-off” feels less like a creative decision and more like advanced legal counsel; a useful phrase to deploy whenever anyone asks why virtually everything that made Carmageddon enjoyable has disappeared. The old games gave you freedom. You could race, or not race. You could disappear across the map, hunt opponents, flatten pedestrians, wreck things in increasingly absurd ways and generally behave like an antisocial idiot in a physics sandbox designed by people with questionable taste and a sense of humour. Here, you just drive forward, and maybe every now and then partake in some sort of undercooked, short-lived destruction derby arena (mind you, a cir…

I can't compare it to the earlier Carmageddon games, since I've never played them, but I enjoy this game and the atmosphere a lot. I'm really hoping for a track-select multiplayer mode in the future!

It's fan arcade race game

To be Clear. This game is fun and i am having a blast playing it. However I can't help but feel that level progression depends more on luck than any skill. No matter how good a run is I have yet to complete a full run. Now many might say, "you must really suck" But alas it is not only I that has had this issue. The damn rain is a frame rate killer on a 5070!!!!! Yes lots of complaints. Maybe it's nostalgia, but i am still having fun.