Carmageddon: Rogue Shift review – not banned in the UK

The original game was banned in the UK and there hasn’t been a new entry for a decade, but can the zombie-squashing Carmageddon make a successful return from the dead?

For a few years, in the latter half of the 1990s, video games became a societal and parental bête noire, supposedly responsible for all that was wrong with pre-millennial youth. Naturally, games publishers were swift to exploit the situation, courting controversy wherever they possibly could; the phrase ‘all publicity is good publicity’ presumably reverberating around the era’s boardroom tables.

In 1996, Resident Evil launched with a poster campaign featuring a tub full of gore, to represent the bloodbath players could expect, and a year later Carmageddon was delighted to get tabloid newspapers and parent groups whipped up into a frenzy, with its headline grabbing theme of mowing down random passers-by. The moral panic that ensued made it very famous indeed, but that celebrity came with unintended consequences.

Originally designed as an open world racing game, where running over pedestrians was actively encouraged, Carmageddon was inspired by 1970s Sylvester Stallone-starring B-movie, Death Race 2000. The unbridled fury the game’s marketing department managed to unleash led to the game being effectively banned, as the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC), which used to rate games before PEGI existed, refused to certify it for release.

To assuage the ire of the press and British state, Carmageddon’s luckless pedestrians were replaced by zombies, with the blood they spilt on impact changed from lurid crimson to infected green. It retained a macabre, splatterhouse sense of humour, now tamed by being applied to the undead, along with its somewhat underwhelming driving action.

Ironically, its infamy was easily the most interesting and memorable aspect of a game that might otherwise have vanished from the collective subconscious. Well, that and its exceptionally well chosen name, a fact that its sequel, Carmageddon 2: Carpocalypse Now clearly understood.

The third game in the series, released in 2000, was even more lacklustre than its predecessors, and while there was an attempted reboot a decade ago, the franchise has been dormant until its own zombie-style resurrection this month.

Billed as a spin-off rather than a direct sequel, Rogue Shift rings a few changes, the biggest of which is that it’s a driving game roguelite. Starting with a simple car armed with a machine gun, you take to a series of tracks that wind through a zombie-infested urban wasteland. Graffiti strewn derelict buildings, industrial backdrops, and a relentless heavy metal soundtrack supply a look and feel that seasoned players will find familiar.

Each race comes with a primary and secondary objective, typically asking you to achieve a podium finish, along with running over a quota of zombies, nitrous oxide boosting for a certain distance, or causing a preset amount of damage to fellow racers. You achieve the latter by shooting, ramming, or boosting into rivals, but you’ll soon discover the innate tension between destroying other racers and attempting to win: when you’re in the lead there’s nobody around to ram.

It’s an issue that also affects your choice of vehicle, each of which tends to favour either speed and manoeuvrability, or resilience and damage dealing. The tracks feed that dichotomy by placing immoveable pillars, pipes, or indestructible barricades in your way. Clipping one of those brings you to an immediate halt, which takes a while to recover from, especially in a car designed for pugilism rather than speed.

To compensate for that, there’s absolutely shameless rubber banding, to the extent that in boss battles, that pit you against a small cadre of enemy vehicles, when a collision briefly halts your advance, you’ll see the boss and their henchmen effectively parked a few hundred metres up the track. There’s a similar process when you’ve been in the lead for too long, with cars occasionally sailing past you even though there’s been no fault on your part.

Races are punctuated by trips to the mod shop, where you buy weapons and perks in the hope of building up your car sufficiently to take on a boss that appears at the end of each set of levels. Although you can acquire rerolls, what’s in stock when you arrive is a matter of chance, as is – to some extent – the number of credits you’ve earned. That means making sure you have a useful weapon such as the rocket launcher, as opposed to, say, the thoroughly useless lasergun, is also mostly governed by fate.

Carmageddon: Rogue Shift isn’t a terrible game, but it’s also not a good one, hamstrung by races that aren’t exciting enough, its multiple built-in random factors overwhelming any sense of the skill you develop as you play.

Its meta game of gradually acquiring permanent upgrades holds some allure, as does unlocking better cars and weaponry, but when the racing itself isn’t that gripping there’s only so much that structure can add. Which is all very authentic as far as the franchise’s history goes but still means the game is far more interesting to read about than it is to play.

Formats: PlayStation 5 (reviewed), Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch 2, and PC
Price: £32.99
Publisher: 34BigThings
Developer: 34BigThings
Release Date: 6th February 2026
Age Rating: 16

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