"A rushed out game and a bad one too."

Cosmic Carnage was the first fighting game for SEGA's 32X and was released just after the first batch of games came out that were launched with the machine. This game is also known as "Cyber Brawl" in Japan. However this game was rushed out since SEGA were getting busy with other things (eg preparing to mess up the Saturn launch and it's software)

For a fighting game, the story is quite unique. In deep space two ships have collided, and there is only 1 working escape pod left. The 8 remaining life forms must fight it between each other, the one left will get to use the life pod. At least it's not another "There was a big fighting tournament" stuff we get with every Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat game.

There are 8 very different characters. 4 are good, 4 are bad. In Japan there were human characters but in every other country they were changed to aliens. Why did they do this, exactly? You can't say because it was too violent to have humans fighting each other because every other fighting game had this, some with a lot of gore (eg the Mortal Kombat games)

Interestingly each character has armour and there are different types to select. With some armour it appears that you can do some moves of your character that you cannot do with others. Armour can be smashed off, and then your character may not be able to do any special moves at all.

The controls are taken straight out of Street Fighter 2 with different strength level attack buttons and holding back to block. Each fighter has special moves but some are just tough to perform. This game is much more violent than Street Fighter though and steers to the Mortal Kombat side of things. Finish your opponent with a special move and there are some pretty gruesome deaths, including heads bursting, arms being removed, legs being removed etc, with a lot of blood.

Graphically this game is poor. The sprites do make use of the 32X with enlargement but the backgrounds are crap and look worse than some games on the Genesis/Mega Drive, with most of them not having any animation in them at all. There is some nice Neo Geo style camera zooming when fighters are close to each other but that's about it.

The sound for the game is pretty bad. It isn't anything that the Genesis couldn't do. The sound effects are also pretty poor but most shockingly there seem to be no speech samples in the game either.

Playing the game is like playing a poor Street Fighter rip off, and this is no where near as classy as other top league fighting games. There is also a terrible amount of slow down as you play.

I'm pretty sure that there are no proper endings in the game either, there is just one generic one which, when you see it because I'm not going to tell you here, is highly disappointing.

If you want good 32X fighting games, then get Virtua Fighter and Mortal Kombat 2. Cosmic Carnage is a pretty poor fighting game that obviously was rushed out and was ever properly completed.

4/10

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 06/06/05