Game Reviews

Carnage Racing

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iOS
| Carnage Racing
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Carnage Racing
|
iOS
| Carnage Racing

Carnage Racing is a little rough around the edges - sometimes literally. Its cars cut jagged forms as they race down the slightly dull-looking tracks, their collected weapons exploding in uninspiring flashes of orange pixels.

In spite of that graphical inelegance, the violent racing at the heart of the game keeps things reasonably interesting, and the slightly-odd time-shift mechanic means that there's at least one part of the game that feels fresh.

Not that carnage-y

After picking a car you're dropped into an eight-way race to the finish. The vehicles might verge on the realistic, but the setting looks like something cribbed from a PS2 kart game. You dart around a twisting dirt track, collecting glowing blue orbs.

As well as giving you special weapons that you can launch with the tap of a button, these orbs also fill up a meter on the left-hand side of the screen. When it's full you can use one of the magical gates littered around the track.

These gates swallow you up and spit you out somewhere further down the track. They're essentially cunning shortcuts, albeit in the form of mythical gateways that let you phase through dimensions. Real Racing this ain't.

Your car accelerates automatically and you control the brakes and the steering. The tilt controls are smooth and accurate, and you don't need to pop out your wrists to make sure you get around particularly tight corners.

You'll probably only use the brakes to back up when you're rammed off the road, but it's nice to know they're there just in case.

Car-rage

Carnage Racing is quite a lot of fun, and a fully featured multiplayer mode lets you scrap it out against friends and foes alike to prove who's the best at utilising magical portals to sneak into first place.

The single-player is a little less exciting, with the game's defects and dull aesthetic coming more to the fore when you're not trying to overtake real people with hopes and dreams.

Still, if you're looking for an antidote to the slightly po-faced car-sims that have been taking hold of the App Store recently, you could do a lot worse than checking out this slightly bonkers addition to the racing genre.

Carnage Racing

While it is a bit less bonkers than its name suggests, Carnage Racing has a solid and entertaining core
Score
Harry Slater
Harry Slater
Harry used to be really good at Snake on the Nokia 5110. Apparently though, digital snake wrangling isn't a proper job, so now he writes words about games instead.