2026 has barely begun, but it’s already shaping up to be the year of dormant racing franchises being revived.
Next month sees Tokyo Xtreme Racer return to PlayStation, while Milestone’s arcade racer Screamer (launching in March) is the first new entry in the franchise in nearly 30 years.
Meanwhile, Carmageddon has made a surprise comeback with the release of Rogue Shift. Yes, a new Carmageddon game in 2026 – we can scarcely believe it either.
The first new entry in the combat racing series on PC and consoles in 10 years, Carmageddon: Rogue Shift was abruptly announced in December during the PC Gaming Show. Its release comes less than two months later, unceremoniously dropped like a January dumping ground movie a studio has little confidence in.
What’s more surprising than a new Carmageddon game in 2026, however, is the developer behind it. While all previous mainline series entries were the work of the Isle of Wight-based Stainless Games, Rogue Shift is helmed by 34BigThings, the studio behind Redout. The anti-gravity series features combat elements, but this is otherwise fresh territory for the Italian team.
After Stainless Games’ final Carmageddon game, Max Damage, was released in 2016, the series was acquired by THQ Nordic. This led to cars and tracks from the original combat racing series appearing in Wreckfest.
With the recent disarray at parent company Embracer Group leading to 34BigThings self-publishing Rogue Shift, there are signs that its development may have been tumultuous.
Combat evolved
For returning fans of the franchise, this is a radically different take on Carmageddon.
This latest entry emphasises weapons-based combat, shooting and blowing up opponents rather than smashing into them. Cars can be equipped with all manner of weapons, from missiles and mounted machine guns to shotguns, allowing you to lock onto rivals and blast them into the sky in spectacular fiery crashes.
Despite the creators stressing it’s a spin-off rather than a mainline entry, this shift has raised a few eyebrows among Carmageddon fans. It’s certainly a diversion, making Rogue Shift more comparable to games like Full Auto, Death Rally and Gas Guzzlers, mixed with hints of Blur.
If the original Carmageddon was inspired by Sylvester Stallone’s scrappy cult film Death Race 2000, Rogue Shift is the bombastic Jason Statham reboot, replete with armoured cars, dark industrial tracks and explosions galore.
Fun fact: the original Carmageddon was supposed to be a Death Race film tie-in game until the licensing deal fell through, so the film franchise has always inspired it.
The open environments in previous games have also been replaced with linear tracks set in locations ranging from an abandoned airport to a storm drain and a construction yard. Most are set at night, with a grungy art style harking back to when colour palettes in PS3 and Xbox 360 games were various shades of brown and grey.
While this suits the game’s apocalyptic vibe, the visuals look dark, drab and dated, despite running in Unreal Engine 5. It’s a stark contrast to RedOut’s radiant locations. Couple this with the on-screen chaos, and the visual style often makes it difficult to appreciate the action.
Gone, too, is Carmageddon’s signature crude humour. Instead, Rogue Shift plays it straight, set in a 2050 post-apocalyptic wasteland where the end goal is to escape to a spaceport.
As such, you won’t be slaughtering innocent bystanders crossing the street or mowing down cows. Instead, the pedestrians are replaced by The Wasted, hordes of zombies that swarm the streets at night. Their presence isn’t entirely superfluous, though, as hitting them tops up your boost meter.
This tonal shift also means there are no infantile innuendo puns. Prat cams, Carmageddon’s live feed of your driver reacting to impacts, have also been cut along with the cast of quirky characters, replaced by anonymous drivers. These aspects haven’t all aged well, but Carmageddon at least had a distinct identity that’s missing here.
With so much of the series’ core DNA stripped away, Rogue Shift arguably shouldn’t be branded as a Carmageddon game, much like how Unbounded feels out of place in the Ridge Racer series.
Rogue Shift does, at least, retain Carmageddon’s ominous heavy metal soundtrack, though the environmental and vehicle sound mixing accompanying it seems too muted.
There is, however, one aspect that sets it apart.
Drive to survive
Rogue Shift’s biggest departure from the series is its progression structure. Taking cues from games like Road Redemption, Blood Drive Rally and Heading Out, this is a roguelite racer that sees you progress through a tree of randomised events, from standard races and figure of eights to survival challenges and eliminator-style ‘death races.’
Between challenges, you can unlock perks, buy new weapons from dealers or repair your vehicle at set intervals. There’s an element of strategy here, too, as the same type of upgrades can be combined to increase their effect. For example, combining two combat kits increases collision damage.
Each of the three tiers of events culminates in a boss battle punctuated with a comic book-style cut scene, where you must either destroy or outrun a heavily armoured Mad Max-style vehicle.
The twist, however, is that if you lose all your health at any point, you lose your credits and must restart the entire game from the beginning, unless you have purchased a golden ticket, or won one in the loot box-style scavenger events. Consequently, individual events can’t be restarted. This structure is an acquired taste, but it’s novel in a racing game.
When starting each session, Beatcoins, that’s Beatcoins, not Bitcoins, earned in events can be used to buy permanent upgrades. These can increase the amount of damage you can inflict, allow free repairs or improve weapon reload times, among other advantages.
As the campaign progresses, the difficulty ramps up considerably, introducing Elite races that require a first-place finish, survival events and larger grids of opponents. Even with upgrades installed, reaching the final tier of events is no easy feat, even on low difficulty.
Repeatedly restarting from the beginning can be frustrating, particularly if you fail to find a repair one second before the countdown expires when you’re low on health. Luckily, the loop of unlocking new vehicles, acquiring new upgrades and experimenting with different perk combinations is alluring, coupled with the mystique of the secret final boss.
But with no extra game modes, single event options or any form of multiplayer or leaderboards, there is little to do once you finish the campaign. It’s a shame, because combat games thrive in split-screen or online multiplayer.
With enemy cars exploding everywhere, large zombie hordes and police ‘Enforcer’ vehicles joining the fray, the spectacle during the anarchic races can be impressive.
Thankfully, a late patch update has resolved performance issues that initially plagued the PS5 version, which targets 60fps and a dynamic 1440p resolution, when the action was too chaotic, with further optimisations expected at launch.
Performance was solid on a modest PC build, with only the occasional slight hiccup during the most frenetic action.
Alongside the PlayStation and Xbox releases, Rogue Shift is also available on Switch 2. Sadly, we were unable to test this version, so it remains to be seen how the visuals and performance compare on the less powerful hardware.
Disappointing destruction
Ultimately, the novel roguelite mechanics can’t mitigate Rogue Shift’s fundamental flaws.
For a combat-focused game, the destruction leaves a lot to be desired. The original Carmageddon’s damage modelling was revolutionary for the time, but Rogue Shift’s is comparatively basic, limited to paint scratches, shattered windows, panels detaching and minimal bodywork deformation.
Conversely, rivals show more extensive damage when destroyed, reducing to smouldering wrecks in explosions, but the canned animations where the wheels instantly disappear look dated.
Games like Wreckfest and BeamNG.drive have spoiled us with soft-body damage. Expecting Rogue Shift to meet these standards from a small team with no experience making vehicular combat games is unreasonable.
That said, the vehicle damage is a disappointing downgrade from the 10-year-old Max Damage. In that game, cars can even split in half in severe impacts.
Likewise, the visceral physicality of collisions in old Carmageddon games is sorely missing in Rogue Shift, with impacts that feel weightless and inconsequential.
Compounding this are vehicles that simply aren’t enjoyable to drive. Every class, whether it’s RWD, FWD, or AWD, feels floaty, twitchy and light. RWD cars in particular can feel like you’re driving on ice.
Some of the later vehicles you can unlock have better grip, but there’s a lack of precision that makes it frustratingly easy to lose control even if you countersteer and let off the throttle. At low speeds, most vehicles also have the turning circle of a tank and take an eternity to turn around if you spin out. This also makes it frustratingly difficult to navigate tighter turns, causing you to overcorrect when exiting a hairpin.
A conflicted combat racer
Carmageddon Rogue Shift makes some bold changes to the established series. But the result feels like it was originally a different game before a recognisable IP was slapped onto it. It’s easy to see why this happened. This is a niche genre that struggles to find an audience, and so any attempt to revitalise it should be celebrated. But the result is a combat racer with an identity crisis.
While it won’t appeal to everyone, a roguelite racing game is an interesting idea with rewarding, if repetitive, progression, and we commend 34BigThings for trying to reinvent the series. But beyond that, the visuals and moment-to-moment gameplay are generic, while the core driving and destruction leave a lot to be desired.
Like the Death Race films that inspired it, Carmageddon: Rogue Shift can be fun for a few hours if you switch your brain off, but it’s ultimately disposable.