This Is Terrible

Car Mayhem is a lot like some of the best racers out there that handle well, have a great soundtrack, have gorgeous graphics and sport some of the best racing action you can find. The only things that set it apart is that it doesn’t handle well, the music and sound suck, the graphics are on par with a middle-school student’s attempt at a mobile game, and there is no racing action to speak of. It looks laughably bad from the pictures on the Playstation Store, so I took a chance and looking back my money was better spent getting lit on fire or stuffing it where the sun don’t shine, but not actually stuffing it there because money is very dirty and I have standards.

From the title screen you can either play the game, or select the shop to buy your cars. The shop has a ton of cars to choose from, and you buy them with coins you pick up while playing the game. Many of these are palette swaps of one particular type of car. I can only guess that they did this to give the game replayability so that somebody out there who’s a completionist will actually spend the time to get all of these instead of just picking one and using it. If you decide to take that busride to hell and play the game, this polecat turd has 3 modes: Pursuit, Destruction, and Apocalypse. 2 of the 3 modes all take place on the same map. There’s no settings, there’s no options, no nothing.

Pursuit mode is like the dollar store version of Need for Speed: Most Wanted. You drive around the map while the cops chase you, and you collect coins. If they hit you, you’ll lose health. The game is over when you explode or get really bored and back out to the main menu. I can’t stress how slow the cops drive. You have to actually stop the car for them to catch up to you, or because the physics are so bad, you just have to let the car randomly spin out or flip over from running over a curb or sideswiping a bench or tree. Going in reverse is so overly sensitive that you will most definitely not have any control over where you point after turning in reverse. This is all somehow still happening while you also drive slowly – it’s as if your driver accidentally went over a speed bump too fast and is going extra slow to watch for more of them. You can laugh as much as you want to but we’ve all done that.

Destruction mode is basically a destruction derby where you and bunch of other boxes – I mean “cars” – hunt each other down with the objective to hit them enough times that they explode and you get 30 coins from it. There’s also some ramps and jumps here to do stunts from, however there’s no point in doing those because you get no points or recognition for doing stunts. Again, due to the physics being terrible, you can’t do any flips or barrel rolls, so I would guess these are just for decoration. I also couldn’t figure out what determined the damage when you’d hit a car. Was it the side or front? What about when you hit it from the back? If I were to pick which mode is the most interesting, I guess I’d say it’s this one, but that’s not saying much at all.

There’s no settings, there’s no options, no nothing.

Lastly, we have Apocalypse mode, a mode where they very, VERY loosely mimic the game Carmageddon. You basically just run over zombies until the time runs out. The way they actually ruined this mode is by having a 5 minute timer to kill the most zombies. Let me tell you what, this is a LONG 5 minutes. You don’t get a reward for running over so many zombies, so the coins you collect while hitting these stupid things is all you get from it. The map is the same as Pursuit, with what has to be the smallest mall I’ve ever seen, a strip club, and depending on which part of the map you’re on, the developers never felt the need to flip the buildings in the correct direction, so the signs on each shop are backwards. I mean look at them. How could they miss this?

So what else did I notice? There’s only a few sound effects throughout the whole game, and it’s mostly when you hit something. The cars don’t make any sort of noise when they accelerate, there’s no screeching of tires, and the cars themselves don’t really drive all that differently that I could notice. Also the trophies were conspicuously absent and gave me an error message when I tried pulling them up, but I did manage to get 2 while playing. I don’t know if that was just a problem with the Playstation Network or with the game itself.

So as you can guess, I have nothing good to say about this game. It’s the worst game I’ve reviewed since I started this channel. With that said I’m skipping my normal pros and cons list and instead will show you a list of things I’d rather do than play this game.

– Mow the lawn in the middle of the summer…in Florida
– Get a prostate exam
– Go to the post office on a Saturday morning
– Re-play Jumanji: The Game
– Get a wine headache
– Shop at Wal-Mart on a Sunday afternoon
– Clean my cats’ litterbox
– Cry

Please don’t buy this and get something else.