Rogue Shift is the latest entry in the Carmageddon series, and the first non rerelease on consoles/PC since 2014’s ReinCarnation. In this roguelike reimagining of the controversial vehicular combat series, your goal is to make it through a series of races, survival maps, and boss fights to win the right to try and cross the Tremorz Gorge. You’ll race across several locales, from burning highways to twisted sewers and industrial districts, all the while flattening Wasted and avoiding or obliterating your fellow drivers as well as the law. Each win brings credits to repair and upgrade your car with perks and new weapons, as well as Beatcoins.
After you die or complete a run, you’ll be taken the Black Market, where you can use those previously Beatcoins to unlock new perks and weapons, which will become available at the weapon dealer and mechanics, alongside permanent unlocks like increased health, damage, and reduced prices. You can also unlock new cars, which all come with their own stats, starting perks and weapons, although those last two can be swapped out whenever you’re at a mechanic. Winning a game with a car also makes its starting perk available at the mechanic.
Speaking of cars: It’s in the name of the game, so you’d hope they play well, and they do. There are around 14 cars available, with a great variety of cars ranging from fast, drifty, armored, etc.
Overall, the driving feels good (my understanding is that it was not great on launch but was improved in a patch sooner after). Sidebash and boost add a bit of depth to both cornering and maintaining speed, although spinning out is very punishing and it’s usually faster to just reset. My only issue is that the game leans more into a Mad Max aesthetic for the vehicles rather than the over the top, Death Race 2000-esque look of the classic series.
As is befitting a game made in the style of Death Race 2000 and Mad Max, there are some additional mechanics in addition to the usual driving standbys. You’ve got a sidebash that can be performed left or right to avoid damage or slam right into your enemies. You also have a boost, which gives you a huge increase in speed to break away or gain on enemies, or again, just slam into them. A word of wisdom: try performing a sidebash while you’re still in a boost--it increases the damage by a huge degree. There are a couple of things that elevate these mechanics for me.
For example: Sidebash can be utilized for mobility: it allows you to dodge around projectiles and obstacles, including corners, allowing the player to weave through tight turns by basically driving right through them. It’s very arcadey, since it can change your momentum instantly, and speaks more to F-Zero, but it feels so right when combined with boosting.
You get several charges of boost, with the number increasing through purchases in the black market, as well as after completing boss fights throughout a run. I can’t really tell if it recharges at all on its own, because you can get more far more charge by performing “Special Actions.”
These including killing Wasted, the zomb-ish creatures staggering throughout the levels, other racers, and the Enforcers, who will try to take both of you down. You also get it from performing death defying maneuvers like drifting, jumps (and extended air time), riding on walls, etc.
Additionally, many of the walls are actually raised ledges that allow you to hit corners and the sides and not only not crash but retain speed, slingshoting yourself around corners, through tunnels, etc. This leads to these flow moments where you’re chaining all these special actions and continuously boosting, maintaining this speed by bashing around obstacles and enemies, or killing those enemies to gain even more charge.
How do you kill those enemies? Guns! You aren’t just limited to using your car as a bludgeon, you can also equip it with a wide range of death-dealing instruments. It’s a simple but satisfying system, and the weapons feel good and turn Wasted and drivers alike into piles of gore and metal (which I’m pretty sure is the title of a song on the soundtrack). Lock-on missiles, the spine launcher, and spinfusor (which is like a exploding harpoon that does more damage the farther it flies) are the top tier, with the only underwhelming weapons being the machine guns and the laser.
Some simple buffs like a wider lock-on cone would play into the machine gun’s “low damage but very quick to bring to bear” playstyle, and a significant damage boost over time for the laser could justify it having to maintain a lock on for an extended period of time, because the game definitely favors weapons that can delivers big bursts of damage quickly.
As is befitting a roguelite, there are also a variety of perks that can be equipped at mechanics throughout a run. I think this is probably the weakest part of Rogue Shift because the most of them boil down to more health or damage, more shots in a burst, more damage in exchange for taking more damage. The most interesting perk is the one that makes your sidebashexplosive, but overall most perks are just a percentage change of your stats.
More a removal than a change are the win conditions, or lack thereof. Most races are decided exclusively by who finishes first: there is no longer winning by killing all opponents, as the AI will continually respawn after each death, nor winning by killing all pedestrians (or zombies in Rogue Shift) as they also appear to repopulate the map. These were hallmarks of the classic games, and while I don’t think every race needs to follow these same rules, it would add some much-needed variety to the mode selection.
In general that’s what this game needs: more modes. There’s technically 4 kinds of races: Death Race, finish all laps without dying while also being in the top 3; survival, where you need to finish two laps as a lone racer while being harassed by an extra-large Enforcer presence; “Elite” races, same rules as regular but you must finish in first; and bosses, of which there are 3 you can possibly experience in a run, and the final boss.
It’s made worse by the fact that regular races make up 95% of the levels. Survival races are rare, and Elite Races, while fun, are just a regular race with a lower margin for error. Note: the game has recently launched patch 1.4, which comes with an entirely new Challenge Mode.
It adds a bunch of modifiers that are selectable before a run, a few examples: car handling is more realistic; all perks are cheaper, but they expire after four races; a massively increased and far more damaging Wasted population. That last one is great, as the Wasted become an issue that actually need to be accounted for rather than just stumbling packs of Boost charge.
This is a game that is worth more than the sum of its parts, that needs some a polish and potential before I’d call it great. The driving is great, the courses are good, the weapons are fun, and it’s super satisfying to blow apart groups of Wasted and other drivers alike. It’s all the trappings that are a little wanting.
There are fun builds, but they’re fun because the game plays well and not because they’re interesting, nor do they change your strategy. Not to mention that if the game included the different victory conditions, I think that would have gone a long way in incentivizing the player to go in any direction other as much health, damage, mag size and burst size as possible.The addition of challenge mode is great, and adds a much needed shot of variety to the game. I just wish we got some of that variety throughout a single run in the form of other types of races.
The other issue is a little more universal and subjective, and that’s that this game feels like a combination of a several other racing and car combat games, and the original Carmaggeddon feels like a very small piece of it. The addition of weapons, boosting and bashing, no additional win conditions, the darker overall tone, zombies instead of pedestrians, it feels more Twisted Metal plus the driving from Mad Max (2015) with a little sprinkle of Split Second and F-Zero in there. It’s a really solid combination, but fans of the classic series may feel it’s a little light on what made the series unique amongst car combat games. I’d still recommend it, purists be warned, this game is a bit of a Frankenstein.
