Carmageddon: Rogue Shift – A roguelite, metal on metal, post apocalyptic car combat/racer
Carmageddon: Rogue Shift The legendary Carmageddon engine roars back to life, reimagined for a new era of vehicular combat.
Buckle up and brace yourself—Carmageddon is screeching back onto the scene in 2026! Developer 34BigThings just announced Carmageddon: Rogue Shift, promising to take this nearly-30-year-old demolition derby for a wild spin with “modern roguelite depth and silky arcade handling.” In other words, get ready to crash, smash, and respawn your way through chaos like it’s the ‘90s all over again—only now with even more ways to lose your hood (and possibly your dignity).
Trailer:
“We are bringing something fresh to the franchise and the racing genre”
“Carmageddon means explore, experiment, paint the streets red and crumple up opponents. We want our players to adapt, upgrade, and unleash destruction on zombie hordes with glee behind the wheel of a killing machine. Rogue Shift will hit with those who fondly remember the legendary series, and those who are discovering it for the first time — reignited, reinvented and more thrilling than ever.”
Carmageddon: Rogue Shift is gearing up to deliver a roguelite campaign so wild, you might need a seatbelt just for your couch/sofa. Picture this: branching event maps, dynamic challenges, and the kind of progression that makes every “lethal underground race” feel like rush hour on steroids. The masterminds at 34BigThings are throwing in enough variety to make even the most indecisive gamer dizzy—15 vehicles you can soup up, 13 weapon classes for maximum mayhem, and over 80 perks that stack and synergize until your brain needs a pit stop. True to Carmageddon tradition, you’ll be racing against opponents while mowing down hordes of zombies (now with extra-chunky supermutated bosses!) and tangling with mechanical war machines. Buckle up—it’s going to be a bumpy (and hilarious) ride!
Back in 1997, the original Carmageddon screeched onto PC platforms, gleefully mowing down any sense of decency—or pedestrians—in its path. The game was so controversial (on purpose, mind you) that some countries swapped out squishy humans for robots and zombies, because apparently running over the undead is much more polite and did not force the game to get banned in that country. Stainless Games kept the chaos rolling for decades with sequels like 2015’s Carmageddon: Reincarnation and even a mobile spinoff called Carmageddon: Crashers—because why limit mayhem to just your desktop? Now, the torch has been passed to 34BigThings (part of the Embracer Group), who are best known for making Redout—a racing game so fast it’ll make your head spin faster than a Carmageddon pedestrian dodging a speeding car!
Honestly, my biggest gripe is that this game has none of the glorious chaos that made the series a 90’s legend. If I don’t see old grannies on zimmerframes dodging traffic and yelling “I was in the War!” at every turn, we’re in trouble—mixed reviews incoming! I practically grew up flattening polygons in the original Carmageddon games. Now? No demolition derby mayhem—just pew-pew guns. Forget open world carnage; it’s all straight-line snooze-fests. And where are my hapless pedestrians? Replaced by zombies with all the excitement of wet toast. They basically slapped on an old name and called it a day. Well not quite, yes we now have guns on our tarmac eating mean machines and alot has been added since the 90’s. From what i have seen, any original Carmageddon player like myself just needs to remind themselves that the game has been brought up to todays standards. We just got to have our fingers crossed that the Developers do stick to what made Carmageddon a true masterpiece and HOPE that even in todays age, these pedestrains, grannies still get thrown in to the madness and the game sticks to it original roots, and the dev’s should not fear lawsuits. Its perfectly normal that we can plough down pedestrains in Carmageddon, Its 100% normal, and that we have their backs!
Carmageddon: Rogue Shift is coming to Nintendo Switch 2, PlayStation 5, Windows PC (via Steam and Epic Games Store), and Xbox Series X sometime in early 2026.