 There’s not exactly a plethora of quality combat racing games on the market today. Ever since Twisted Metal and Vigilante 8 graced our Playstation consoles, we’ve had high standards. It has to be intimidating for a budding developer to take a leap of faith on a combat racing title, knowing full well that success and quality are not easy to achieve.
Enter DT Carnage, Agetec’s latest foray into the gaming world. Now, this game isn’t exactly in the same vein as the arena-style combat racers of yore. Rather, DT Carnage is a true circuit racer, with a few missiles and bombs thrown into the mix. Think Mario Kart, except with fewer Koopa shells.
Obviously, there are two essential components of this genre, the racing and the combat, that must be executed well. Unfortunately for Agetec, they failed on this front. With a lack of variety in weapons and skills, blowing up your AI counterparts just isn’t very enjoyable. Add to that a broken racing system, and you’ve got a title that falls well short of mediocre. In the end, DT Carnage feels like a jumbled mess that was haphazardly thrown together with little rhyme or reason.
You should probably speed past this bad boy. Hit the jump to find out why.
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Agetec essentially shoehorned a watered-down story line into DT Carnage. At the beginning of the single-player campaign, entitled League Conquest, you’re presented with a brief cutscene. Here, you’re informed that your father was one of the greatest drivers in the DT Leagues, an underground racing organization centered on speed and destruction. During a commonplace duel, daddy was injured and sent to the hospital. Tragically, he vanished that same night. As his son, you are tasked with unraveling this pseudo-mystery and seeking vengeance for your father’s fate.
Throughout the course of your racing escapades, you’ll receive minute doses of storyline here and there, but the information delivery is sporadic at best. In the latter stages of the game, the story progresses via boss battles, but every facet of the narration is vague and confusing. Ultimately, you won’t really care what happened to your papa, and his memory will fade into the ether. No, the main character won’t forget about his dad, but the gamer controlling him most likely will.
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To begin your quest, you have to sit through a painfully slow tutorial section. Here, you’ll learn all the pertinent information about the weapons and skills at your disposal. You’re guided through this process by an unnamed tutor. This guy is obnoxious. It’s not necessarily any specific thing he says that’ll get on your nerves. His mere presence will provoke thoughts of homicide after a few short minutes.
The explanations in the tutorial section are delivered via pop-up messages, mostly at the beginning of each practice race. A couple bulletins here and there wouldn’t be so bad. But no, your tutor inundates you with about a dozen messages at a time. Most of them are full of common sense ideas, so you really can’t skip them quickly enough.
Once you drudge your way through the tutorial section, you’re off on your main quest through the DT Leagues. Each league is stationed in a particular city throughout the overall world map. In order to move on to another city, you must first defeat the boss in your current city.
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But before you can get right down to the racing, there’s another surprise for you. Can you guess what it is? That’s right! It’s more commentary from your tutor! Aren’t you excited? No? Good, because you shouldn’t be.
The information contained here is a bit more useful than what you had to endure earlier. But, it’s just as annoying. Your tutor gives you a “quick” walkthrough of the different menus in the League Conquest mode. The most important knowledge you’ll gain here pertains to the RPG-like upgrade system in the game. As you complete races, you earn points based on your performance. These points can then be spent on the Growth Board, a giant upgrade tree from which you can enhance your abilities, buy new skills, and even unlock new cars. Sadly, although the Growth Board is enormous, you rarely have many options as to which upgrades you wish to purchase. In order to spend your hard-earned points on a handling upgrade, you must first unlock that upgrade. And to unlock that upgrade, you usually have to buy something near it on the Board. Under normal circumstances, you only have between 3 and 6 options to upgrade at any given time.
The rest of your tutor’s spiel is about as dull as you can imagine. And worst of all, after you sit through his endless rant, he’ll “recap” everything he just said via a PowerPoint-like presentation. These cannot be skipped. Nope, you are absolutely required to suffer through the pain as you stare at a plain white screen with black text on it. Sounds fun, right? Oh, wait…
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Before we dive into the meat of the campaign, we need to pick a driver and an automobile. If you find yourself torn between which option to select, take solace in the fact that it makes no difference. All drivers and cars feel nearly identical, regardless of the statistical differences their overviews will suggest. Al though this probably doesn’t make a huge difference, as most gamers will habitually stick to a single driver/car combination throughout the campaign, it essentially erases any need to play through the game more than once.
Okay, so now that we’ve fought our way through all the introductory fodder, it’s on to the heart of DT Carnage: the combat and the racing. Unfortunately, neither of these is very much fun.
Let’s start with the racing, shall we? For starters, the controls that are outlined in the game’s manual are incorrect. In the guide book, you are informed that X = gas, Square = boost, Triangle = brake, and Circle = reverse. In reality, X = gas, Square = brake, Triangle = reverse, and Circle = boost. It’s silly, I know, but it can cause a huge deal of confusion and frustration for quite some time. It seems like one of the easiest things to do for the game would be readying the manual, but this isn’t even done correctly. That’s a bad omen for the rest of the game.
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Aside from the confusion over the controls, the actual racing in DT Carnage just isn’t fun at all. For starters, your opponents’ cars almost always seem to be more powerful than yours. This can be overcome by using your weapons, but it is very detrimental in some race modes. In Survival races, for instance, the goal is to stay alive the longest, so position on the track doesn’t matter too much. But, after every lap, all cars that aren’t leading the race will receive a healthy dose of damage, so an underperforming vehicle can easily doom your hopes of victory.
Early on in the game, your cars perform so poorly that they’ll actually struggle to make it up hills. Yes, I’m serious. In the very first city after the tutorial, the main track has a slight hill that apparently is too steep for our massive racing machines. Your car literally slows to about 40 mph while climbing this epic mountain. Needless to say, that’s never going to be fun.
There are a couple other drawbacks to the racing that will frequently lower the fun-factor in DT Carnage. For example, letting off the gas during a turn will typically throw your car into a spin. Even on an oval track, where you usually don’t need to brake on corners, taking your foot off the accelerator for a split second will have you spinning donuts around the track. On top of the mechanical frustrations, the AI in the game just doesn’t perform too well. Your opponents will frequently avoid picking up weapons and items throughout races. And when they do pick up items, it often leads to their demise. On countless occasions, I watched a car in front of me lay down a “fence.” A lap later, while driving down a wide-open straightaway, this same car ran into this same fence, having forgotten it had laid that particular trap. While this can be funny, it’s also very depressing at times.
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Now, I can hear exactly what you’re thinking, dear reader:
Okay, Larry. So the racing is bad. But what about the combat? That has to be good, right?
Believe me, I wish I could say you were right. But, the combat doesn’t get much better. However, the drawbacks aren’t quite as numerous.
The weapons and items in the game are picked up by driving through gates throughout each race. These gates provide the first bit of frustration here. In order to receive an item, you must squeeze 100% of your car through the gate. If even the slightest edge of your vehicle clips the edge of the gate, you get shafted. And sadly, this will cost you races. No, it’s not just a possibility; it will happen. Missing that gate by a couple pixels will eventually allow an opponent to finish in front of you.
Additionally, you’ll find yourself picking up the same items over and over again. In some races, you may pick up nothing but oil slicks. Play through that same race again, and you may pick up nothing but EMP attacks. This wouldn’t be so bad if certain races were item-specific. Instead, the same race will give different items a monopoly over your driver on occasion. Moreover, the items you pick up quickly feel redundant. Initially, it seems like there are plenty of options at your disposal, but you’ll ultimately become very bored with the same old weapons and obstacles.
There are a few different game modes to wade through in DT Carnage. Aside from the League Conquest campaign, there are 2-player races, timed races, quick races, and three mini-games. The 2-player mode can be fun if you have a good friend sitting next to you, and the Bowling mini-game can actually be pretty entertaining. But, all of these game modes are directly tied to your progress in League Conquest. So, unless you have suffered through the solo campaign enough, you’ll be stuck with crappy cars and unskilled drivers in all other game modes.
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The strongest aspect of DT Carnage is its visuals. Regrettably, that’s not saying much, as the graphics here are on the decent-but-not-great level for PS2 games. But the car models do look pretty good, especially when they receive damage. Bumpers and fenders will fly off, door will flap open, and flames will shoot off the back of your vehicle if you take enough of a beating. Likewise, the tracks on which you race are relatively pleasing to the eye. Some feel more “alive” than others (specifically the tracks with environmental hazards), but none of them really look bad at all. A few of the environments could be lit a bit better, but those instances are few and far between.
It’s sad to see a developer take a chance on a title, only to fall flat on their face in the process. DT Carnage has some good ideas in it, but the overall package feels sloppy. It almost seems as though Agetec came up with as many game concepts as possible, then hastily threw them all into the game without much analysis. With a bit more tuning and a little more consumer testing, this game could have been a lot of fun. Instead, it’s full of moments that will make you put your head in your hands and sigh with frustration. Unless you desperately need a combat racing fix before Vigilante 8 comes out on XBLA, you can probably skip right past this one. And even if you do need that fix, you’re better off getting your hands on something else.
Final Score: D
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