RuneScape developers Jagex have just announced a thing: Carnage Racing. It’s a Unity-powered Facebook game all about cars, not swords, and tracks, not spells. Intriguingly, it’s being developed by the (presumably sexier and more tanned) Californian wing of the Cambridge-based studio, a team made up of ex-Rockstar devs who’ve worked on the acclaimed Midnight Club games. That’s potentially great news for anybody who likes excellent games about cars.
Jagex say that Carnage Racing mixes track racing with weapons, warps, boosts and tricks, in a manner that doesn’t look all toodissimilar to a canny hybrid of TrackMania’s arcadiness and Micro Machines’ vehicular combatiness.
The Facebookracer will dish out experience points and in-game currency as rewards for winning races, which can in turn be spent on new cars, new guns and “special features which could propel players to the front of the grid”. Up to eight players can take part in the game’smultiplayer mode, while the lonely, shy or otherwise society-fearing can race against AI cars.
The involvement of Midnight Club veterans is reason enough to cock an eyebrow at this, though if it’s even fractionally as much fun as the incredible Mashed (over which I have lost friends) then I’ll be there on day one. Carnage Racing launches in November.
And, in lieu of a Carnage Racing trailer,here’s Mashed.