Total Carnage

Archives to complete, stories to cover. That motto should guide anyone diving into Total Carnage — a 1994 arcade shooter where you play as a journalist or spy sent to some dictatorial country to clean house. Game logic? Simple: shoot everything that moves, collect ammo, and satisfy your hunger. Sounds monotonous, and frankly, it is, but that's precisely where the genuine arcade audacity hides.

Graphically, it's a top-down view for one or two players running across the screen through maps packed with soldiers, civilians, projectiles, and pickups. Don't bother trying to understand the story — there's nothing to understand anyway. Your character is simply a living weapon you control with a cursor or joystick, blasting in all directions. The controls work intuitively, which is the only right way for games like this. But when the game demands you play carefully because health drains lightning-fast, you feel that initial frustration kick in. You want to be an uncompromising terminator, but the hardware and design decisions push you toward caution.

Individual levels feel sterile — you run from point A to point B, hopefully with minimal losses. There's no real spectacle, no funny disguises or lightning-fast upgrades that would shift your tactics. You collect ammo and food with the same tedium as in any other arcade game from the late eighties and early nineties. Sound effects are dull, MIDI synth music plays somewhere in the distance. The whole experience is held together only by its own momentum — that rush you feel when you suddenly panic and charge into enemy hordes without a shred of strategy.

Total Carnage arrived when such games were already beginning to fade. That meant all originality vanished, leaving only a bare skeleton — enemy counts, projectile counts, increasingly worse visibility buried under chaotic effects. The game gives you no room for creativity, just survival. It's not something you remember with a smile, but rather with that strange feeling when you realize what you thought you'd experienced. Today you boot it up, get twenty minutes of fun, and then close it. It's not a bad game — it's just a game without blood, without soul, that was already boring by minute nineteen. Fine for arcade purists with a free afternoon; I forgive the rest of humanity.