Ever watched Deathrace 2000 (the good one with David Carradine, not the watered down sequels) and wanted to join in? Well, thanks to Stainless Games's Carmageddon: Max Damage, you pretty much can. Partly funded by Kickstarter, the game updates a series which has been running since its original PC incarnation in 1997.

From the main menu you can choose to play in career mode, in fact you are forced to play the first level of this before the game will unlock the freeplay and multiplayer options

There are three configurations for the controls, but no way to assign actions to buttons, so once again a game which uses both sets of bumpers, making playing it on Vita remote play a remote possibility.

You can configure the HUD, although the default settings are just fine. For some strange reason you can change the colour of the blood between red green and blue. The default camera setting is chase and thankfully you can change this to in-car cam or bumper cam, both of which improve the game experience. The game comes with three levels of difficulty.

The garage offers some limited customisation; you can change the colour of your car as well as its rims and as you complete chapters enhancements become available.

So all that piffle aside, what is the game like? Well, on the plus side the environments are vast and open for you to roam across. In career, games can be won in three ways, either you eliminate all the opposition, run down, or otherwise kill all the pedestrians on the map or actually finish the race, which will require you to do some of the former work just to get enough time to win. In career mode the game offers up sixty-three activities, which should be enough to keep most players happy.

The second mode of play is the freeplay option where you can tailor activities to suit your own tastes. Oddly, there is a massive zero where the local co-op play should be, which is a real shame as the chance to play against other real people is a little limiting. There is an online multiplay option, but for all the time of review play I was unable to get a game and even when there were games available it’s a ridiculously low number.

So, for the most part you will be playing against AI drivers, whose one intent is to turn you into scrap metal. Occasionally they can get a dose of the stupids and block you in, ending in a situation where no one can move.

For all of its best intentions there are a couple of things which let the game down. The first is the graphics, which are not as sharp as they should be. The game would have been better served if the developers had gone for a more comic look, then the graphics short comings could have been turned into knowing irony.

The biggest problem with the game is the car's handling. For a game whose aim is to sit back, shooting the sh*t while gleefully mowing down pedestrians and opponents, the car should be easy to control; in fact it’s pretty much the reverse. You have the usual accelerate and break on the shoulder buttons and the ability to pick up power-ups along the way, but you’re going to find this somewhat difficult. The car seems to have almost no traction and will slide around at the most inopportune moments. Killing your opponents is doable as is finishing the race, but I would suggest you give up trying to kill all the pedestrians: your likely to die of frustrated boredom before you can finish.

Many of these issues can, of course, be dealt with by suitable updates, without which this flawed game is likely to flounder.

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Charles Packer