DT Carnage

Rating Everyone Genre racing Publisher AgeTec

It may be a generous description, but if you think “Gran Turismo meets Mario Kart”, you wouldn’t be far off in describing DT Carnage.  While the focus is primarily on racing, a big part of the game also includes equipping skills, gathering on track weapons, and blowing the hell out of the other cars on the track.  There’s a kernel of a good game in here, but I don’t know if it was rushed out half complete just to get a title off the shelf for a fading system or what.  The bottom line is that the execution doesn’t live up to the potential.  There’s a background story as you start your racer’s career, but it’s really not worth mentioning.  It’s barely brought up through the game and doesn’t seem to change no matter which driver you choose.  Once you’re done with the intro though it’s straight to the track.  DT Carnage actually does a decent job as far as using the intro races as a good tutorial.  Learning the buttons and the on screen information is critical if you want to have a chance in most races.

What sets DT Carnage apart from most racing games is the Mario Kart aspect to it.  There are arches scattered throughout the track and driving through the arch will give you a random weapon.  The weapons include missiles, oil slicks, and droppable ramps among others.  The catch to the game is that winning the race on time is only one way to succeed.  You can also win by destroying all of your opponents.  For a PS2 game, the damage modeling is actually quite good.  Bumpers will fly off of cars, doors will swing open through turns, and if you beat someone up enough they will trail smoke and flames until the car finally gives up.

In addition to the on track weapons you can also build up driver skills to bring into battle.  One will cause an opponent’s steering to reverse.  Another will block their windshield or cause the driver to become tired and lose vision.  All of these skills are handled through the Growth Board.  It’s an RPG wrinkle that has a lot of weight.  Depending on your standing in each race you earn growth points which can then be used on the board.  The Growth Board is a giant checkerboard with each tile containing a car attribute upgrade or various skills.  It costs points to purchase a tile and each purchase flips and reveals the tiles adjacent to it.  As I said, there’s a lot of growth here, but the actual implementation really hurts the game.

For the first couple of tracks, the opponents generally don’t have any attack skills.  The key is to avoid getting blown up and try to win races and accumulate attributes and skills of your own.  The biggest hiccup I’ve run into has to do with how the skills are handled.  Each skill has various levels.  A Level 1 Windshield Smear will hit the opponent for 5 seconds, while Level 2 takes it to 7 seconds and so on.  Unfortunately, you can’t buy the Level 2 skill until you have Level 1 already.  This wouldn’t be such a big deal except that I have access to skills going all the way up to Level 5 and have uncovered a good chunk of the board, but can’t use any of them because Level 1 is nowhere to be found.  The real problem of all this is getting the defensive skills that can be used as counters to the attacks.  For instance, with the Windshield Wiper skill, you can deflect the Smeared Windshield.  This all becomes very irritating very quickly as you advance to second tier tracks where the opponents will attack you all too often.  For too many of the attacks, if you don’t have the counter, you effectively get incapacitated.  The Smeared Windshield completely blocks your view and if you don’t stop you’ll either run into an obstacle or get turned around.  In other words, you become quickly useless very early in the game until you can uncover the skills you need.

What this ultimately devolves into is the pain of so many RPG games when you have to go back to easier levels and farm points.  I know it happens a lot, but having to farm just to make the jump from tier 1 to tier 2 is just bad game design to me.  Even once you have your defensive skills equipped, it becomes a nightmare to manage them.  You never know what the opponents will bring into the race and you get very little, if any, warning when you’re about to be hit with an attack.  Since there are so many possible attacks, you’ll have to flip through several defensive options to get to the right counter.  Needless to say it gets tedious in a hurry and crashing while trying to figure out the right counter to avoid crashing gets old fast.

The imbalance of all this is what leads me to believe that this was a rush job to clear the title out of development before the PS2 finally calls it a day.  The bargain price for this title helps somewhat and I’ve had less fun for $15.  What hurts most is the missed opportunity.  With some tuning and tweaking this could have been a fantastic game.  As it stands, it’s good for a few hours, but if you’re like me you’ll get tired of getting quickly overmatched as you try to progress.