Carnage Battle Arena Review (PC)

Smashing through Carnage Battle Arena is a bit like dumping a treasure chest of LEGO bricks onto the carpet and hitting the scattered wreckage with a paper mallet. It’s a pointless exercise, and the clean-up process is an absolute pain in the backside. But the few bouts of adolescent joy that you receive from creating the Mona Lisa of broken sandboxes is more than worth the trouble of filling the box back up again, funnily enough. It’s also a lot like participating in a group exercise in a rage room of some sort. Again, the act of physically destroying your surroundings is fun, if not just a teeny weeny bit pointless. Yet, even with no real purpose to call its own, Carnage Battle Arena still gets one thing right: it makes pandemonium and mindless destruction feel strangely satisfying to execute.

Armed with a highly effective carousel of cars, SUVs, trucks, and other questionable wagons, as well as a trove of manically high-octane game modes that range from Death Match to Racing, Battle Royale to Free Drive, Carnage Battle Arena doesn’t just bring a fresh lick of paint to the livery; it extracts the best possible components from countless sandbox IPs and bundles them into a bubbling pot of explosive action-oriented combat and archaic gameplay. There are somewhere in the vicinity of 82 vehicles to unlock, a cascading waterfall or power-ups to wax, and dozens upon dozens of dynamic and destructible maps to explore, including a football field, an aircraft hangar, a dockyard, and even an archipelago of cotton-coated clouds, to round off just a small portion of its world.

Curious to hear more about Carnage Battle Arena? Then let’s get behind the wheel and tuck into a few more details.

Crash Test Dummies Required

At the heart of Carnage Battle Arena is a simple yet mindlessly cathartic vehicular combat-centric offline PvP game in which chaos-addled players duke it out to conquer dozens of breakable brick-based maps. As I said earlier, the game features a surprisingly meaty selection of modes to choose from, with its bread and butter Death Match serving as the main course within a sizable banquet of sprightly appetizers of an equally hazardous design. Think Cel Damage, but with more brick-based shenanigans and eruptive mayhem, and you’ll probably have a rough idea of what we’re getting at here.

For an offline game, there’s a generous amount to pick at here, with a surplus of traditional in-game modes, frequent Challenges, and a neatly crafted livery that’s teeming with saloon vehicles, SUVs, and a comical array of questionable modes of transport to whittle down. Would it benefit from a PvP mode? Absolutely. But, you know how it is — any way the wind blows. It isn’t exactly out of the realm of possibility, is what we’re saying. And quite frankly, it has the potential to break into that market, too, given the amount of maps and PvE components that it already has stashed in its catalog. It would just be the case of broadening its scope, naturally.

Break Worlds, Not Rules

The component that drives Carnage Battle Arena is its destructible design. Like a lot of sandboxes with questionably illegitimate foundations, the game allows you the opportunity to wreak havoc on not only your opponent’s vehicles—a separate act that brings about its own satisfyingly unpredictable visual effects—but the world and all its disposable set pieces, too. Regardless of the mode that you opt to explore, the game more or less offers you an excuse to smash, carve, and recklessly annihilate whatever objects you happen to encounter. And I’ll be honest, it’s a great deal of fun — even when it isn’t the aim of the game.

Carnage Battle Arena may not boast the realistic look or strikingly authentic performance tropes of a slick modern-day racing simulator, but it does, however, make the simple act of bolting around on a cartoon-like playing field feel both tediously entertaining and rewarding. And like I said, with a surplus of regions to explore and an abundance of vehicles to unlock, there’s definitely a good chance for it to expand and host an even grander demographic in the future. But maybe I’m jumping the gun on that one.

Given that there isn’t so much of a structure to the game, it can be somewhat difficult to gel with a lot of the mindless happenings that take place in Carnage. That being said, the mechanics aren’t at fault here. In fact, the gameplay itself is surprisingly easy to learn on the go, with its primary features being reminiscent of a classic arcade destruction derby. Granted, there’s a lot to take in, what with countless crashes taking place and objects spiraling left, right and center. But honestly, I think that’s sort of what it aims to achieve: a recklessly designed world that removes formal boundaries.

Verdict

For those of you who might be interested in getting behind the wheel of an SUV and wreaking havoc on a brick-and-not-so-much-mortar universe of broken, almost confetti-like structures and sandboxes, Carnage Battle Arena ought to have you covered with its jam-packed livery of souped-up vehicles, pick-me-ups and explosive terraforming systems. Suffice it to say here that, in spite of it being one of quite possibly hundreds of vehicular combat titles in the current era of PvP racing-arena hybrids, there are still numerous examples as to why Carnage Battle Arena is overly qualified to service your cravings for something more chaotic than the bog-standard smash ‘em up.

To make your decision that much easier to make, I’ll leave you with this: truly, if pointless vandalism and economic ruin are the fuel injectors that lift your spirits and elevate your dopamine levels, then I honestly couldn’t think of a better place for you to hang your coat and launch your career in brick-based tomfoolery. Granted, Carnage Battle Arena won’t be the most invigorating racing experience that you’ll participate in this year, but it ought to give you a lot of harmless surprises whilst you wait for that next awe-inspiring circuit to grace the track.