Those events play out in progressively unlocked fashion in the career mode, which escorts you through various stages across different locales. As such, events simply take far too long, ranging from 10 to 30 (!) minutes each. You’ll spend many wasted minutes chasing a target, only to have an AI rival beat you to it and then have the next objective spawn way back where you had just come from. And because the objective you’re driving toward is often randomly spawned around these huge maps, they’re frequently lost before you even have a chance to compete for them because someone else happened to be closer. Driving across the giant areas is either boring or frustrating, especially on some of the poorly-designed maps that require difficult indoor navigation. Every free-roam map is enormous – a revelation in 1997, but a dull chore now. In short, Carmageddon’s late-’90s sensibilities fail it in 2016.

Unfortunately, like the recent lukewarm Beavis & Butt-Head return on MTV, time has moved on, and Carmageddon hasn’t aged well. And to its credit, the new Carmageddon: Max Damage recreates the feel, structure, and sense of humor of the original two games in the series quite well. Back in the late ‘90s, Carmageddon’s open-world, pedestrian-squashing racing mechanics were fresh, exciting, and hilarious.

Carmageddon max damage ps4 review ign