Carmageddon TDR 2000

Carmageddon: Total Destruction Racing 2000 (Also known as Carmageddon 3 for short or Carmageddon TDR 2000) is a vehicular-combat racing game developed by Torus Games and published by Sales Curve Interactive in Europe and by Xicat Interactive in North America for Microsoft Windows. It is the third installment in the Carmageddon series, and is the first (and so far only) game in the franchise to not be developed by series creator Stainless Games. The game was released on September 1, 2000 in Europe and December 14, 2000 in North America. There was a Game Boy Color port on development, which was very similar to the Carmageddon 2 port for GBC, this version of the game even had a trailer and was announced in the official website of the game, however, the GBC port would later be cancelled, presumable due the commercial failure of TDR 2000 and Carmageddon 2 for GBC being panned.

Bad Qualities

 * 1) To begin with, this game wasn't developed by Stainless Games, which are the original developers of the Carmageddon franchise, instead, Sales Curve Interactive decided to contract out Torus Games for the development of the third game of the franchise. In case that you're not familiarized with them, Torus Games is infamously known for making some of the worst games of all times.
 * 2) As you could expect from another developer that is not well known for making good games, this game lacks the personality and the feel of the previous entries. The original Carmageddon games were widely known for being games that gave a lot of freedom to the players to do whatever they wanted regardless of the current objectives of the game by giving them a lot of time bonuses that could be obtained by running over pedestrians, crashing or destroying your opponents or picking up items that gave you more time, but in Carmageddon TDR 2000, this is removed almost completely. The time bonuses now barely give you enough spare time to explore the maps, usually segments of 2 or 3 seconds, and if this wasn't enough, the maximum amount of earnable time consists of only five minutes.
 * 3) Because of the very limited amount of maximum time that the player can earn and the unrewarding checkpoints, some of the levels are completely impossible to beat if you decide to pass through the checkpoints and complete the required amount of laps without doing anything else, forcing the player to destroy the enemy cars or to kill pedestrians just to get enough time.
 * 4) Not even the missions have a wider range of time to complete them. All of them will just give you only five minutes to complete all of the objectives, and since there aren't rival vehicles to destroy and the pedestrians don't count anymore to increase the timer, it's almost for sure that you will have a lot of troubles while completing them.
 * 5) In the previous Carmageddon games, you had to do a mission after four or five races, but in this game there is one mission per race, which can be very tedious for the older players because of the sudden change of pacing, and if that wasn't enough, most of the missions have no sense or any logical context behind them and can be very infuriating at times because of the aforementioned time issue and how difficult can certain objectives be. For example, one of the first missions of the game require you to free a caged shark with a bomb that you previously armed, and all of this to kill the shark with mines just one mission after. The worst part of this specific mission is the fact that it's very hard to hit the shark because the mines that your car can shoot have a very poor range and the shark is too fast and can barely be seen in the water, forcing the player to get very close to the shark just to complete the mission.
 * 6) Carmageddon is not a franchise that stands out by its plot, but the problem of the plot of the career mode in this game is that it's very weak, and as it was mentioned before, most of the missions don't make any kind of logical sense, which ends up ruining any kind of possible background or plot basis that the game could've have. However, the worst part of the plot is the ending, which can be considered one of the worst endings that have ever existed in the story of videogames because of how dissapointing and illogical it is, watch for yourself.
 * 7) The physics are quite lackluster and unrealistic if you compare them to the previous games in the series. To mention a few examples, street poles will stop your car instantly if you hit them, even if you go at high speed or have a heavy vehicle. Physics also seem to be affected by numerous bugs residing on the collision detection of the many objects and vehicles, as they can make you fly off if you crash against them at a very high speed or at a very specific angle.
 * 8) The game has a considerable amount of bugs and glitches that can make the experience more infuriating than it should be. As it was mentioned previously, many of these bugs and glitches reside on the collision detection of many objects, roads and vehicles, for example, in one of the many bridges of the game, there is a very specific point that will cause your car to fly off and will probably destroy your car if its very damaged, but there are some others that are even more insulting, like certain objects that can instakill you by just touching them.
 * 9) Pedestrians have to be hit several times with your car just to be killed (Mostly like two or three times), but not satisfied with that, the pedestrians will constantly attack your vehicle and run away with a dizzying speed, and due to this, it's almost for sure that you'll rely on your weapons just to kill them, as they can instakill the pedestrians without involving a lot of effort.
 * 10) The opponent AI is extremely limited in the sense that they're not as challenging as they were in the previous games. In most of the cases, they can either focus completely on the race and forget about the player and the other opponents or crash you constantly and between themselves and barely move from the start line. The opponent AI is also very stupid, as in some cases they won't try to fight back whem you're crashing them, and sometimes they can even have troubles while performing curves or jumps, however, there are some cases where the opponent AI (Especially the AI of the police cars) will always follow you, to the point that if you fall into a narrow corridor, they will also get into it and trap you, forcing you to restart the game from the start of the race if you don't have any weapons or boosters that could help you to get off there.
 * 11) While the 3D models designed for the game look alright, the textures of them look very muddy. Most of the vehicles look like if they were melting down, making it hard to see the details of them, something that is even more noticeable when you switch to the cockpit view, as the interiors look far worse than the outside.
 * 12) Just like the previous games, to unlock a new vehicle, you have to destroy it and later buy it after you've finished the race, but the problem is that all of the cars are excessively expensive in comparision to the average of money thay you get after completing a single level, and what's even worse is that most of the vehicles barely differ from the others in terms of general stats (Speed, acceleration, handling, etc).
 * 13) The upgrade system is a pretty cool idea in paper, but the problem is that every stat of the vehicle that can be upgraded (Armour, power and offensive) has a total of 30 slots, but you only have 7 unlocked and one filled, and after filling all of the other available slots, you have to buy the spaces separately. These spaces are not exactly expensive, but taking in consideration that there are a total of 30 slots in each catergory, you will spend a lot of money buying spaces and filling them just to upgrade your vehicle, and on top of that, a single slot will not make a great difference in the stats of the vehicles, forcing you to buy many of them to only see a slight upgrade.
 * 14) The sound design is quite uninspired, lazy and mediocre, and this can be mainly seen in the most common sound effects. For instance, the sound effects of the crashes are so scratchy and loud that your ears can begin to hurt after hearing them constantly for more than 10 minutes, but the thing doesn't end up there, all of the vehicels share the same ugly engine sound that reminds more of a vacuum cleaner rather than a car, not even the cars with different appearances (Like trucks, vans or sport cars) have a different sound or even another pitch of the default engine sound.
 * 15) As it can be expected from a very old piece of software, the game is prone to crash on PCs with Windows 7 installed and up. Most of these crashes are caused during the very first race, but sometimes the game can crash before the first race can even load complately or it won't outright open and crash at the startup. For this, you have to install a fanmade patch to make the game run adequately, but even with that, the Steam version of the game is still a mess because it will not even play the soundtrack during the races, there is another patch that can fix the lack of soundtrack, but because of a bug that resides in the Steam version, it will stop playing after a while and there is no way to solve that issue other than closing the gaming and opening it again.

Good Qualities

 * 1) While they're not as frequent, the CGI cutscenes look surprisingly better than the cutscenes from the previous games, specially if you compare them to the hilariously poorly-made intro from Carmageddon II: Carpocalypse Now.
 * 2) The damage modeling is very well designed and detailed for a game released in 2000, and it's also more realistic and solid in comparision to the previous games of the franchise, or even to other games of the same genre. The designs of the vehicles also look very cool and unique, and some of them are clear references to vehicles from other great franchises, like the cop car from Mad Max.
 * 3) Surprisingly, the handling is much better than in the previous installments. In the previous games, most of the cars didn't have a great handling model because of the destructive nature of the game, which made them feel very awkward to drive, but here the handling is more appealing and feels less stiff than the other games.
 * 4) You can manually remove the timer or modify it so you can never run out of time by messing with the game's files, and as ironic as it may sound, there's a programming error in the game that will cause the timer to never go below two minutes. To trigger it, you have to damage your rivals constantly with very little time between attacks until you get to the maximum amount of time allowed by the game, after doing all of this and waiting for the current minute units to go down, you'll see that it gets stuck in the same minute unit for the rest of the current level.
 * 5) As it was mentioned previously, the upgrade system for the stats of the vehicles is a pretty nice idea, also, the upgrade system benefits all of the vehicles that you own, meaning that you don't have to buy and fill slots for every single car of the game separately.
 * 6) The soundtrack is quite good, such as "Plastic" and "Shoot The Dog" by John 5 (of Marilyn Manson and Rob Zombie), including "Sick" and "Techknowledgy" by Utah Saints. Unfortunately, the soundtrack is not present in the Steam version of the game, but as it was mentioned above, it can be kinda restored with a patch and the GOG version still includes the soundtrack.
 * 7) The game has tons of new content, especially vehicles and tracks, and there's even a fanmade MAX-Pack patch, which adds even more new cars and tracks, like the Carmageddon II 's Eagle MK3 in all its classic glory, unfortunately, this patch seems to unlock all of the available vehicles in the game, which can disappoint some players.

Ratings
It's debatable how bad this game really is, but there is no doubt that Carmageddon TDR 2000 was not as well-received as the two previous games, despite receiving mixed or average reviews. The game so far has a score of 61.79% from GameRankings and 48 out of 100 from Metacritic. It was also a commercial failure and the future of the franchise was subsequently in limbo until the release of Carmageddon: Reincarnation over a decade later. At the time the game was released, some minor game magazines actually gave to the game a good score on their reviews and it is relatively easy to find Carmageddon fans on the forums claiming that the game was not so bad, only just lesser than the two precursors. Ironically enough, when the game was brought to Steam, the publishers and the original developers announced it as "The turd game in the Carmageddon series", showing up that they don't feel exactly proud of the quality of the game.

Nomad from the Russian website Absolute Games rated the game with a score of 50% (Mediocre), saying: "Let's sum up the results of the race. Torus Games, led by SCi greedy for green papers, only managed to create an exact copy of Carmageddon 2, and so that the new version can be identified only by three letters before and zeros after two, a modified menu and extremely aggressive music. With cheat codes, pedestrian instead of zombies and scarlet blood, the game, oddly enough, can even bring joy, but impudent cloning with impunity does not work with us. Keep your five points, dear SCi, and remember: once again make a copy of your name, we will crush. Fast, but painful. With a bonus for high artistry."

Henning from the German website 4players.de rated the game with an 80/100 and he considerated that the game could have been a real hit if it wasn't for the many deficiencies in the graphics and AI of the opponents. Shortly describing: "All in all, Carmageddon TDR 2000 is a lot of fun and promises many hours of play."

Usul from the French website Gamekult rated the game with a score of 6 out of 10. Praising the renovated physics engine, the level design and the freedom that the game gives to the player, but criticizing the graphicss and animations and the lack of innovation in general.

Dejan "Dex" Grbavcic from ActionTrip rated the game with a 71%. Saying that the game had an improved AI, graphics, cutscenes and missions in comparison to the previous games, but that it added nothing new to the series and criticized the bad playability, the camera view and the long loading times. Shortly describing: "Even though Carmageddon TDR 2000 shows progress over its two predecessors, there is nothing terribly new that would knock old Carmageddon fans out of their socks. The most important ingredient, the shock factor, remains with the first two games."

The Spanish youtuber RetroMierdas rated the game with five turds out of ten, saying that it almost killed the entire Carmageddon franchise and warning the players to not buy it on Steam, since it doesn't work adequately on modern operative systems.

Reviews
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Longplay
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Gameplays
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Game Boy Color Version
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