Carmageddon: Rogue Shift has a promising premise that’s let down by the execution

Not quite Carmageddon, but not its own thing either

Random Select is a new column from Polygon about under-the-radar video games. Every week, Polygon's editors assign a writer to check out a game at random, downloading the game without knowing beforehand what it is. The catch? They have to play for at least an hour and report on their thoughts — honestly. This week's game is the racing game Carmageddon: Rogue Shift.

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Carmageddon: Rogue Shift is a vehicle carnage game, or so you'd think. Car violence is in the portmanteau. Vehicular combat is the series' legacy. It's not, however, in Rogue Shift, at least not in a way that matters. Rogue Shift feels like developer 34BigThings wants to imagine a future where Carmageddon is more than just running things over and blowing up what's left. But it's too beholden to the series' past, and new elements like randomized power-up selections feel more like dabblings than bold steps forward.

The idea of Carmageddon: Rogue Shift is that zombies overran the world, and you're competing with other racers in cars kitted out with high-tech weaponry to see who can mow down the most undead and keep normies safe. There's no sense of camaraderie here, though. "Saving lives" doesn't extend to yours, and your fellow racers are just as happy to throw your body on the pulpy pile of zombie corpses. Which, it turns out, is a really annoying problem.

Enemies have the ability to respawn endlessly, but death is the end for you. Imagine if getting blue-shelled in Mario Kart ended your game immediately, but you could set everyone else on fire or throw them off the track and they come back like nothing happened. It's immensely frustrating, and feels like an artificial challenge added just for the sake of increasing the difficulty in what would otherwise be a straightforward game. (The challenge doesn't last, either. In a game where cars come equipped with flamethrowers and missile launchers, I'd expect maintaining first place not to be this easy.)

Rogue Shift is straightforward. The explosions, the grunge, and the general edginess mask what's essentially just a simple racer with some added violence for the sake of it and a fairly shallow roguelite element in the form of randomized car upgrades. Running over pedestrians feels somehow less satisfying than committing the same offense in The Simpsons: Hit and Run, thanks to a combination of minimal physical feedback when car meets body and just how unimportant the action is. At least you get the pleasure of knowing you did something bad in Hit and Run. At least it matters when you Spongebob crowds in the Carmageddons of yore. In the new car murder game, car murder is just an afterthought. You earned roadkill points! They don't matter.

So what you're left with is a survival racing game, which is a strong concept, but one Rogue Shift never builds on. Getting by on the strength of your car build, narrowly escaping instant death while you blast through your rivals — it should be exciting. For a game with customization as a major draw, there's a conspicuous lack of build options. That, or perhaps a bug that keeps perks from rotating properly in the in-game shop. I saw the same 10 or so perks show up again and again in the time I played, and the lack of variety really drags things down after a while. Fire off some rockets. Don't die. Do it all again.

So builds aren't as big a deal as they could be, and the actual car combat matters very little. Rogue Shift instead tries veering more into F-Zero territory and relies on hitting speed boosts as its Big Thing. Clawing your way up to first place thanks to good planning and timely attacks feels good initially, but it's not the kind of "feels good" that you can easily recreate, or that evolves into something you want to keep experiencing. The track design is just too basic and uncomplicated. Once you've cleared one round, you've seen almost all of what Rogue Shift is.