Muscle Car Mayhem is packed full of classic muscle cars, but it's sorely lacking any mayhem. While the presentation of this top-down racer is excellent, the polish and diverse range of features don't compensate for the sluggish and boring gameplay.
In Muscle Car Mayhem, you can select from a few different classic cars, such as the AMX 390, Duster, Hemicuda, and Road Runner, to race on one of five different tracks. The appearance of the cars is clearly the best aspect of the game. Each one has a distinct style, and they all look great from a top-down perspective, even if there's no other difference between them. The gameplay involves beating three opponents around turns and roadblocks you'd find in a city, such as cones and potholes in the middle of the street. Unfortunately, the cars move sluggishly through the tracks and around the turns. This makes races often much more tedious than exciting.
This is really too bad, because there's a decent amount of depth to Muscle Car Mayhem, including an online scoreboard that keeps track of best times. Also, you can pick up collectible upgrades for your car, as well as cash that can be used to purchase other upgrades in between races. Although these items are fairly simple to collect, you're always better off ignoring them so you can just run races. Veering off-course for items is unwise, since no amount of acceleration seems to be enough once you're out of first place. Although the visuals are generally of excellent quality, other aspects of the presentation, such as the sound, are sorely lacking. For instance, the music in the LG VX7000 version of the game is really cheesy. It sounds more like a preprogrammed riff from a Casio keyboard than inspiring racing music.
Muscle Car Mayhem has some entertaining aspects, but the gameplay itself falls short of that list. You may find some enjoyment out of seeing and upgrading the available classic cars, but this game can't provide even a modicum of thrills on the track.
