Gas Guzzlers Extreme Reviews

This 2013 title is definitely a fun ride when it comes to car combat racers. For a genre that is critically missing at this day and age, Gas Guzzlers Extreme fills itself in and does not disappoint. Get out your road rage and cause mayhem on the roads of many open locations that you find yourself in, such as deserts, canyons, and forests, whether racing on circuit-based tracks or in open world arena settings. Me being a fan of car combat games myself, Twisted Metal has always scratched that itch for me. We all know that a series owned by Sony will never make it to Steam, so we gotta have a vehicular combat game on our computers so that we can have just as good of a time as Twisted Metal on the PlayStation family.

When Gas Guzzlers: Combat Carnage came out, it was a low budget game that was pretty basic and more a simpler version of Extreme. The menus were orange, vibrant, clean. Even the font that was used was more plastic! If you really loved Combat Carnage before, you pretty much know what you get when you jump into Extreme - albeit with some alterations, improvements, and more stuff added in.

Even if you don't like or are not a fan of weaponized vehicle combat and prefer just pure racing games, Gas Guzzlers Extreme does have that in one of its many game modes so that you can play without having the weapons murder your sleek set of wheels that you love, though damage is still factored in when you collide into stuff.

For the gameplay, it does its job well for both racing and fighting. Since it is a vehicular combat racing game, you can expect the controls to be a balance of simple and complex. They're simple to use because the usual racing controls apply: the right trigger to accelerate, left trigger to brake, A or X to use nitro, left stick to steer, the face buttons to fire weapons, drop powerups, and the right stick to pan the camera around and change weapons. They are complex when you have to coordinate your hands, mind, and sight to figure out what's going on and what the situation is in the heat of battle.

In the early stages of the Campaign mode, you won't have to do anything super complex or difficult. You'll be able to unlock new tracks, cars, upgrades, weapons, and even customization options to identify yourself! You earn cash when you complete events to purchase most of that stuff, but at the minimum, third place is needed to advance to the next track and make progress up the rank list to the top spot before the Cup becomes available.

As you win events, you'll be notified of a sponsor who will give you bonus cash when winning events, and then eventually a rival sponsor will come on board and overtake your previous one to get even more cash. The thing is with the sponsors is that once acquired, you have to keep winning in order for that sponsor to stay. If you lose once, your sponsor leaves you and the bonus money will no longer be rewarded to you until you acquire a new sponsor.

Winning events consecutively boosts your money acquisition tremendously and after winning every few races, there will be a Sponsored Event that you can participate for extra cash if you wish, usually with game modes other than the default ones in the cup such as Destruction Derby, Capture the Flag, and even Deathmatch.

When it comes to the weapons, you have the usual shotguns, MGs, rocket launchers, grenade launchers, and even a railgun, which requires precision. The majority of these types of weapons have variations where you can shoot both in front and behind you. The ammo capacity remains the same, and have a set price. For each car class, you'll have a selection of only 1/3 or all of the weapons. For instance, the first car class in the game will only allow the two shotguns, the MG, and rocket launcher while the second car class will allow four more weapons such as the two gatlings, the multi rocket launcher, and the grenade launcher as well as the previously mentioned ones.

But the main weapons aren't the only thing that you'll need - there are also powerups that will be of great help. Mines that explode when a car drives over it, a stun grenade which blinds drivers as they're racing, oil slicks that cause cars to spin out, shields that make you impervious to all forms of attacks for a short period of time, temporary invisibility, double damage for all attacks, smokescreens that are unloaded behind you, and there are even replenishing pickups like ammo, nitro, and different weapons to help keep you in the game. You can also find money pickups laying around the circuit-based tracks as well as big money pickups in hard to reach places while racing in hectic situations.

The menu UI is also very intuitive, as its easy to guess where things are. Aside from the Campaign mode, you can do a single race without affecting your career and even go into the Multiplayer mode, which makes this game shine! Especially when you have some friends playing with you (one friend will not cut it, get three, four, or more of them), Multiplayer is perhaps the best mode in the game because playing with friends is also the majority of the fun, as fighting the bots constantly gets boring very quickly. While you you technically can play by yourself online, with or without bots added in, it's basically the same deal as playing offline by yourself so it's not much different in of itself.

While the presentation of the game is great, even though the graphics are a little on the cheap side, the humor for this game is really interesting. I mean seeing these words and finding out that an abridged variation of vulgarity is being used just screams out "WTF" to me, in a good way. Ranging from the vehicle names to the weapon names, to the track names, and even the AI driver names meant that Gas Guzzlers Extreme has always had a sense of humor even though they are jokes mainly from the 90s. But, when is that ever a bad thing?

And while I've been praising Gas Guzzlers Extreme, it's certainly not without its flaws. One thing that I don't like is the fact that outside the game, you have to make your own server by using a program. And once you've adjusted the settings, you launch it, and have a window that needs to stay open until you close it whenever you are done on the server. So if the game has its own servers, why should I have to close it and open an individual program just to create my own? I know for a fact that all other Steam games I play can allow you to make your own room online while keeping the game running without the need of an individual window to mess around with, so why can't I do that here?

Another thing that kinda rubs me the wrong way is the voting system for Multiplayer. In other vehicular combat games I play, I am able to change the map and game mode anytime I want, and then boom, It changes in a snap. But here, I need to have all or most of the votes be "YES" in order for the map, game mode, or whatever it is, to be changed. Granted, this is for when other people actually are in the room, but it's still a bad design choice in my eyes. At least you can just be by yourself and change it on the fly that way, but this mode is meant to be played with friends so I'm not counting solo play for that.

For the achievements, it's a long list. 90 of them are from the base game while 15 of them are from the Full Metal Zombie DLC. They are mostly consisted of simple tasks like completing a race without being damaged, killing a set number of opponents with many different weapons and in total, doing multiplayer stuff, and even defeating the bots on Impossible, the highest difficulty setting. Those particular achievements will really test your skill, so you better get good at the tracks and your fighting or you might not be able to 100% the full list. The zombie DLC achievements feature surviving all 10 waves, killing a set number of fat zombies, and general menaces like trolls and hyenas, and banking enough points repairing the base. At minimum, it'll take you like 25 hours or more to 100% the achievement list for this game.


The Verdict
Gas Guzzlers Extreme is a really solid car combat racer, for both arcade racing and vehicular combat fans alike. You'll definitely appreciate what it tries to do, and you need to find friends who can enjoy this game as well. What it offers is a great deal that you could possibly have. Besides the hassle of setting up your own server for online games and the bad design choice of voting to change the conditions, you'll like what this game has in store for you, if you can somehow find a way past all the humor. If only the future ports of this game were just as good as this...

Buy it anyway. And the DLC.