The original Carmageddon introduced the world to the wonders of deformable cars and now TDR 2000 ups the ante a little for other car games that include this feature. Not only do dents appear on impact, but whole panels can fly off the well-modeled cars if they're smacked about enough, revealing engines or even the drivers inside. Smoke billows from damaged engines, and if you drive someone into a wall hard enough (probably with the aid of Afterburners and a Solid Granite Car powerup) their vehicle will even accordion into an altogether shorter vehicle that's handy for parking but not much else. Not only does it look spiffy, but it makes annihilating enemy vehicles all the more entertaining.

The improved deformable vehicles aren't the only improvement to the visuals. Levels are the nicest yet in the Carmageddon series, ranging from small cities and old military bases to Hollywood film sets and desert settlements. They look great and are a joy to drive around, especially as the car handling and physics are yet again also excellent (if a little less than convincing at times for the sake of keeping the action going). The levels also run particularly smoothly, even when you've hit the Afterburners a little too hard and ended up soaring through the sky with a clear view of the entire city. The audio is also rather good on the whole, with distinctive engine sounds for all the vehicles and a suitable heavy soundtrack by Plague and Utah Saints, although I would have prefered it if they stuck with the Iron Maiden music as they did in Carpocalypse now.

Most importantly though, the game's greatest strength is not in what it does that's new (which, to its detriment, is very little) but in what it does right compared to the previous two games. The cars can now take as much punishment as they could in the original - you can once more drive at top speed into a wall and survive to instant-repair the damage, whereas in Carpocalypse Now you were dead meat even if you drove into a lamp post at top speed, which is obviously no fun at all. Whereas the original only let you purchase the odd, seemingly random car from those that you annihilated on the track, TDR 2000 lets you salvage any of the cars you destroy, albeit at a price. Races are done on an often tight timer, and I found it particularly annoying that regardless of how much extra time I got from wasting other cars it never budged above 4 minutes, often meaning finishing the race was the safest course of action rather than trying to destroy the other cars. Things are kept interesting by interspersing the basic race missions with objective based ones. Tasks range from destroying the local mob boss to toppling a giant skyscraper with explosives to create the largest off-ramp in history. Good fun? Oh yes, indeed.

My main problem with the previous two games were some of the simply stupid cars such as the seemingly indestructible monster truck from the Carmageddon add-on and the utterly useless and uncontrollable wingless plane from Carpocalypse Now. Well, good news; Torus saw sense and did away with such pointless designs and stuck to more balanced (yet still slightly insane) vehicle designs such as a heavy yet destroyable dump truck, an F1 car (called the Shark, oddly enough) and even a golf cart with a steel roll cage (don't knock it, that bastard destroyed me once).