I guess I'll answer my own question.
So the first 20 or 30 minutes with the game was rough. I set everything to medium, turned on the effects, anti-aliasing, v-sync. Spend a few minutes trying to figure out how to customize keyboard mapping and give up...the tutorial race ran like dog shit so I quit out. Also took about 5 minutes to load the level. Not promising. My machine is getting aged, but this was still pretty bad, like I was way, way way out of spec for it, which I know I'm not.
Restart, turn off all the extra crap, turn a couple things down. Struggle to read the menus right. Previewing cars takes forever to load each one, and it's unclear whether I'm picking one or not. Fiddle with race stuff, still confused why I can't seem to pick a car, so I just start the game. It's sorta playable, if you like 30 FPS in a racing game. I didn't really read the instructions carefully enough, so my camera gets set to a weird angle, and the "repair my car button" doesn't seem to work exactly as advertised. I crash around the level like a drunk driver, get taken out by racers constantly, to the point my roommate walks away disappointed. Very not promising.
But I persevered. I plugged in my game pad, because the game is way too sensitive to play with a keyboard. I turn everything, absolutely everything off graphics wise. I spend some time messing with race settings (tweaking all the race settings took away a lot of pain. Let me set how much money (i.e. repairs) I wanted, race length, yadda yadda. Answered some car picking questions too.) It takes about ~3 minutes to load a level by now. Still not good, but the levels are fucking huge and it's a "pre-alpha", whatever the fuck that means after this long on Steam Early Access.
And you know what? Plays pretty smooth and doesn't look terrible. Doesn't look great either, but enough to pass muster.
Handles way, way better with a controller than a keyboard (just keyboard because the mouse seems to do fuck all outside of menus) and after a few races I started to feel like I knew what I was doing. It started feeling exactly like Carmageddon Classic at that point. The game, for what it's about, is surprisingly intricate in some aspects. Vehicle damage modeling for one. It's super-detailed (even at lowest settings.) So if you broad side a guy going max speed, their whole car is going to have a noticeable curve to it for the rest of the game. Weapons and tires get smashed off, shifters get busted, engines get critted, and the cars drive erratically.
In the post game review, I could look at some cars and go 'oh, yeah, that's when I nailed that dude doing X" when looking at the damage patterns. Pretty neat.
It handles pretty sensitively too. I made the mistake of starting with the sports cars, and that contributed to me driving like shit. It's the kind of game you have to let off the gas when you turn
The cars handle noticeably differently and while the overall effect is still pretty arcade-y, when you combine it with the damage modeling, it comes off as much more detailed that you'd think at first blush just wrecking into stuff at top speed. The car repair visual is pretty cool too, and pieces of your car reappear and re-attach themselves virtual-reality style as you're driving around.
4 or 5 big levels with several race routes through each. Races are kinda incidental to game in truth, but it makes it feel like there's a lot of content. There's at least 8 or so cars to pick from already, so lots of stuff to try.
The writing in general is reminiscent of the old game too; super crude, occasionally offensive or sterotypical 90s humor. So it gets a chuckle or two for being crude.
All in all it's looking pretty good, once you get it running well. Obviously they have a shit ton of optimization to do, and they consider the game in early, early, early Alpha still. It seems like updates have hit a little over a month at a time, so while development is steady, the game seems pretty stable and it's fun to play at the most basic level of gameplay, it feels like it has a long way to go still.
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Topic: Carmageddon: Reincarnation. Released and ready to a head-on collision. (Read 15650 times)