Carmageddon 3D E3 2005 Hands-On

Kayak Interactive is bringing Carmageddon, the classic racing game that awards players points for committing vehicular manslaughter, to mobile phones later this summer. The game's currently under development by Kayak's recently acquired Swedish studio, Synergenix, which specializes in the development of 3D mobile games. The work Synergenix is doing on the 3D version of the game speaks to the wisdom of Kayak's purchase. The pre-release version of Carmageddon we played had all of the original game's physics as well as most of its graphical fidelity, and it did pretty well in the playability department, too.

Back in 1997, Carmageddon's unique brand of car-borne violence provided a refreshing change from the stodgy driving sims on the PC: the more crazy tricks you pulled, opponents you mangled, and innocents you killed, the better you did. Eight years later, the mobile version of the game is poised to run down the competition like a brakeless big rig. During our demo, we tooled around one of the game's three environments, a typical city square, in our muscle car, scattering pedestrians to the wind. The car jounced around on its suspension very realistically as we collided with various objects; we even almost rolled it at one point. The hapless citizens of the town splattered just like they did in the old days, too, flying over our hood like rag dolls. The action unfolded at a pretty steady 15-20 frames per second on the test N-Gage QD, too.

In fact, Carmageddon performed a lot like an N-Gage game all the way around, in terms of its graphics and ease of control. For example, we were able to cycle through three different camera angles on the fly, switching from behind the car, to first person, to stationary camera at the press of a button. We would have been entirely fooled if not for the game's small download footprint, which will only allow for four types of vehicles and three CPU opponents. There will be several different types of games, however, including simple checkpoint races and "mission races," where you might need to kill a certain number of people under a time limit.

The 3D version of Carmageddon is expected out in Europe sometime in August, with an American release to follow. Synergenix is also working on a top-down 2D version for older handsets. We'll bring you the full review in a few months.