Your car emits a profound rumble as you rev your engine; the referee waves his flag and you rush forward, straight into him, causing him to explode into hundreds of meaty chunks. You don’t care; you don’t even look back at the chaos you’ve caused behind you. This is Armageddon. Carmageddon.

Carmageddon was produced by Stainless Games, and was released in 1997 for Microsoft Windows and Mac. It was one of the few ‘free roaming’ racing games of its time, and bragged to be one of the first sadistic racing games, and for this it has gone down in history as a classic.

You mission is to speed through a number of levels, to attempt to come first in each race.  Unfortunately, each scene has a time limit, so you don’t get too long to explore the rather expansive levels, but in a game as fast-paced as Carmageddon, you don’t really need to.
If you found yourself running low on time, you could run over a handful of pedestrians (or in the censored version: zombies and robots), so you get a little while longer to explore. This is an incredibly vicious game, for its time.

You can play Carmageddon one of two ways – either by performing a legit race, first to the finish wins,  or by turning it into more of a destruction derby: smashing into other cars until they are ruined; therefore, making you winner by default - The second option is more fun than the first.

The sound effects in Carmageddon are satisfactory, the screams of pedestrians is rather interesting, as are the sounds of smashing into other cars or into people. However, the ‘screeching’ of the tires seems rather weak, especially if you’re moving at a high speed – and the car engines don’t really sound quite as strong as they should be.

The graphics are the Achilles' heel of Carmageddon – regardless of the actual sprites not being too unpleasant, the whole game has a somewhat pixelated feeling to it, and I found myself on abundant occasions feeling quite an effect of motion sickness, due to the rather fast moving pixellated scenes. After a few minutes playing it, however, and my eyes attuned, and I was able to play just fine, without finding the game too unattractive.

The gameplay is the key point of Carmageddon – You can either race to the finish, trying for first place, or you can smash into other cars (or collect special pickups) to destroy them, therefore making the competition have one less competitor, making you closer to the 1^st position. As I said before, the second option is the most fun – but also one of the harder ways to play the game, you spend most of the time actually looking for the cars, than you do destroying them, for this reason, Carmageddon has a rather high replayability factor because of the free roam feature, and because of the multiple-choice way of playing, you can vary from smashing into all the cars, to just racing like a normal racing game, to pedestrian hunting - running over the pedestrians for bonus time, to explore the mission for further pedestrians, or for a general look around.

The “gibbing” in Carmageddon is rather humorous to look at; the characters literally explode, regardless of the speed you hit them at. The graphics in themselves are not too attractive, but I eventually got used to them, and was able to truly seek pleasure in running over people.

 Overall, I think Carmageddon is worthy of its “classic” title, it is a fun game to play. Albeit tedious at times, the senseless violence makes up for anything that the game may have wrong with it. The sound is generally appealing, and the gameplay is truly amazing, despite some of the levels designs being rather mediocre.

However, going over a ramp at high speed, then flying through the vast majority of the levels, squishing pedestrians on the way is always good fun, so I eventually forgave many of the bad points of this video game.

 To sum it up...

Sound – 8/10 – Not excessively bad, but a bit repetitive, and the car engines sound a bit dull.

Graphics – 7/10 – the actual sprites are not too bad, but the whole game has a rather fast-moving pixelated crap effect to it, which caused me to experience motion sickness.

Level Design – 6/10 – Generally fun to play, but a few levels feel like the same old crap, or with nasty “pits of Doom” you have to be careful to avoid – it’s not challenging, just frustrating when you get caught in one.

Overall – 8/10 – somewhat dated feeling to it now, but overall, a great game to play, if you’re a fan of destruction-derby types.