Back in the late ‘90s, Carmageddon’s open-world, pedestrian-squashing racing mechanics were fresh, exciting, and hilarious. And to its credit, the new Carmageddon: Max Damage

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In short, Carmageddon’s late-’90s sensibilities fail it in 2016. Every free-roam map is enormous – a revelation in 1997, but a dull chore now. Driving across the giant areas is either boring or frustrating, especially on some of the poorly-designed maps that require difficult indoor navigation. 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. 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. As such, events simply take far too long, ranging from 10 to 30 (!) minutes each.Those events play out in progressively unlocked fashion in the career mode, which escorts you through various stages across different locales. Some are straight races, in which case plowing your spike-loaded vehicle through pedestrians has little payoff (which seems contrary to the theme of over-the-top vehicular homicide); others are sprints to random checkpoints; another more appropriately bloodthirsty mode has everyone racing to kill the same marked pedestrian first. The best of the challenges, though, is a race that lets you win by either hitting all of the checkpoints first, wiping out all rival racers first, or running over every pedestrian on the map first, because then you at least have a bit of choice and variety to help keep things interesting. But one interesting mode does not a robust game make.Adding insult to injury, every event is preceded by a painful loading time that lasts a bit over one minute as well – which is baffling considering these graphics are decidedly last-gen, particularly on the indoor “Storage Vats” course. As you’d expect the accompanying speed-metal soundtrack is grating, and not in a good way, though it can mercifully be turned off in the options menu so you can enjoy the sound of crunching metal in peace.A much-needed strong point is the selection of cars, which is impressively diverse. We get to take our pick from hot rods to monster trucks to my favorite, the DeLorean, aka the “Degoryun” – complete with openable gull-wing doors you can use to whack pedestrians in the head with. I wish their floaty handling were tighter, but when you land a big hit on a foe, it explodes them in a highly satisfying ball of fiery death. The car-on-car violence is made even crunchier by some great random power-ups, which run the gamut from “pelvic thrusts” that launch enemy cars away from you to an anvil launcher that does exactly what you think it does. There’s an element of danger in picking them up, too, as some can actually negatively affect you.As for the intangibles, don’t worry – despite the fact that you’re actively rewarded with points and/or extra race time for splattering citizens in its dystopian future world, Carmageddon’s tongue is wedged firmly in cheek in the humor department. Its cartoonish violence is clearly not to be taken seriously. The jokes are intentionally low-brow, with the f-word and sex-joke puns thrown about liberally. But what once were belly laughs in the time before games like Saints Row The Third set a new high bar for crude humor are now chuckles (though plowing into a cow wearing a radiation suit on an Area 51-ish stage is pretty damn funny). Likewise, what were once impressive new gameplay mechanics and sprawling maps are now painfully aged.