OldKeeper

Allow me start this review by saying that I have been a Carma fan since I first played the demo of the original game in 1997 and that I will probably never grow tired of replaying the two original Carmageddon games. Needless to say I didn't hesitate to back Carmageddon Reincarnation when I found out Stainless was doing a Kickstarter back in 2012. The game was originally set to be released in 2013 but it got delayed several times until it finally materialized on Steam Early Access in March 2014. There it lingered until it was released in May 2015 after yet another delay. I've played every Alpha and Beta version of CR and while the game looked decidedly mediocre and ran terrible it showed a lot of promise so I kept giving Stainless the benefit of the doubt. On their Kickstarter page Stainless states "The Carmageddon community means the world to us" yet they were very silent on the Steam forums and updates were few and far between during the games year-long stay in Early Access. In May 2015 CR finally went gold and it saddens me to report that Reincarnation is still buggy and highly unoptimized. This game looks incredibly dated (it pales in comparison to 2008's GTA IV for example) yet it somehow manages to be more demanding than even the most advanced modern open world titles (eg Witcher 3, GTA 5). Many graphical options have been cut from the final version of the game, normally this would be a bad thing but in CR's case it doesn't really matter because tweaking the game's graphical options doesn't seem to change a whole lot performance-wise, no matter what settings I select this game keeps struggling to maintain 30fps on my system (i7,12gb ram, 960 (4gb) ) and the frame rate drops below 20fps every single time I pick up/ use certain power-ups. Loading times are very long, textures and foliage look primitive, there is no regular traffic, no day and night cycle, no variable weather and no cockpit view. I do like the game's art and the fact that Carma's dark humour is present. The cars also look quite good and they have a proper damage model. If you've played the old Carma games the car handling will feel just right, the game controls perfectly fine with a pad and it's also playable with a keyboard. I don't think wheels are supported at the moment. Peds look pretty dated but they're animated well enough. The gore is nicely done for the most part although I would prefer it if peds didn't explode so easily. AI is rudimentary at best. Your opponents still teleport around the map like they do in Carma 1 and 2. They also have trouble reaching certain spots on the map, this makes them more or less useless during some of the game's new modes. I don't really mind this but if you're looking for a game with challenging, "believable" opponents you may want to look elsewhere. CR has your "typical" fun Carma pickups (both classics and new ones) and there is a varied selection of cool, over-the-top maps. Sadly activating some of these pickups will turn the game into a slideshow, some maps also run much worse than others. The UI is fine but I would like to have the option to toggle it on and off. The replay feature is back and it's a joy to use. Sound design is very good and I would rate the OST higher if it didn't contain bloody dubstep tracks, this is not the biggest issue in the world but I think it's worth mentioning nonetheless because that noise gets really old really fast and it feels totally out of place. Multiplayer modes are still devoid of peds and pretty buggy, lag and random disconnects are still common even when trying to play with RL friends. So no I would not recommend CR, at least not in its current state. I know Stainless isn't a huge AAA studio but if your game looks archaic it should fly on modern gaming hardware, you can't have poor graphics, mediocre AI etc and expect to get away with poor performance.

This f2p "game" is an absolute disgrace and an insult to DK fans and gamers in general. Do not play this "game", do not support this nickel and dime nonsense. "Professional" gaming websites that review tripe like this in a positive light can safely be ignored for they are clearly in ea's pocket and/ or completely incompetent. The original games are still amazing and work very well on modern machines, use KeeperFX to play DK1 in HD.