Raise your hand if you’ve heard of a fighting game called Cosmic Carnage. No one? That’s what I thought. There’s plenty of reasons why this title is so unknown. For one it was released exclusively for the Sega 32X add-on hardware. The system itself was a commercial failure that almost no one owned. Cosmic Carnage is also just not very good. It belongs to a genre that was heavily over represented on virtually every platform at the time. Some props must be given because Cosmic Carnage is an original title. It’s just not a very good one. It’s so bad that Sega swept this one under the rug with not so much as a reference in over two decades. It has a reputation for being bad, but could it really awful enough to warrant complete disassociation? Today we’re going to take a look. Prepare yourself!
Cosmic Carnage has one of the most unusual and hilariously bad scenarios of any fighting game. The setting here is deep space. A ship is transporting prisoners to a celestial mine as punishment for their crimes. While en route the villains manage to overtake the guards and gain control over the vessel. During the mutiny all of the controls were destroyed onboard the ship. The former prisoners last hope is to use their distress signal to attract a military ship to their aid in hopes of overtaking it. The two vessels collide rendering them both inoperable. To make matters worse all but one escape pod between the two has been completely destroyed. All but four passengers from each ship have been killed. The survivors are now left to fight it out for the only chance of survival.
The story definitely deserves credit for trying something different even if it does sound like the plot from a bad comic book. The extra terrestrial theme is really interesting, and I quite like the overall style the artists went for here. Unfortunately you aren’t given much background information on any of the characters, and the endings are all very poor. Whatever amount of good the unusual scenario brings is quickly undone by an obvious lack of motivation and polish. It certainly doesn’t help make any of the characters any more memorable. We don’t play fighting games for their storytelling. Unfortunately the aforementioned issues foreshadow just how unpolished this experience is.
Cosmic Carnage is a simple two dimensional one-on-one fighting game. It doesn’t throw any curve balls your way and is fairly typical by all measures. It doesn’t feature an in depth combo system like many of the other more popular choices of this time, nor does it have fatalities. Cosmic Carnage may feature blood by the bucketful, but it’s less violent overall than say Mortal Kombat because of the colorful comic book art style. I feel like the game suffers from a bit of an identity crisis. The focus on nearly all aspects is spread too thin. There are a lot of features and ideas, but none of them are fleshed out. The worst part however is that the roster is just terrible.
The developers were clearly trying to target kids around ten years old or so. Despite being based around a whole alien sci-fi motif they tried way too hard to make Cosmic Carnage ‘cool’ and edgy. Honestly it tries too hard; I’m not sure I would have liked the characters even then. Cylic is a giant praying mantis that stands upright like a human. Next we have Zena-Lan the only female character included here. She appears to be a humanoid fire creature, but it’s hard to tell exactly what they were going for here. Then there’s a shadow man who fights like a samurai who is named Naruto. Tyr looks like the silver surfer but wears full body armor, and to be honest I’m not really sure what the artists were going for with him either. These are really boring, and like I said earlier, seem like comic book character rejects.
Now we’ve come to the villain characters, and this is where things get weird. These designs are completely over the top. First we have an giant snake that wraps around it’s opponents and attacks with it’s tail. It looks weird, and it is, but somehow that’s the most cohesive character in the game. Then we also have a robotic primate which seems like one of the least interesting inclusions, and two aliens that resemble the Predator at a passing glance.
I didn’t really like any of these to be honest. Just about everyone in the roster is based on something else in pop culture.
You’re given only two options of play here; either story mode or two player versus. Your ultimate goal regardless of choice is to whittle your opponent’s life bar to nothing, and should you manage to do this twice you move on to the next match. So the first problem is the flow of combat. Unfortunately Cosmic Carnage animates very slowly. Your characters simply do not move fast enough for this to be a fun experience. Simple actions like jumping make it feel like the character is floating in air. I get that this game is supposed to take place in outer space, but I highly doubt this was on purpose. You have to sit and wait for the animations to complete sometimes.
To make matters worse they’re all clunky as all heck. Every jump, punch, kick, and special move takes way too long to perform. For the most part this is on purpose to show off the scaling abilities of the 32X hardware, but that doesn’t make the issue at all forgivable. Another problem is the fact that your attacks (regardless of character) never do much damage. You’ll be whittling down your opponent’s health bar a sliver at a time which is very annoying. Matches should not last this long.
Thankfully you can turn off the match timer, and you’ll need to do so if you’re aiming to knock out your opponents. The whole experience is dreadful and boring. Just about the only unique part of the fighting engine is the focus on armor. When playing as one of the soldier characters you can choose between two pieces of armor for them, and this affects if their attack is low or high which is kind of a cool idea. As the match progresses and they take damage certain strikes may break their armor off thus nullifying the effect. It’s a good idea, but not enough to save this stinker.
Cosmic Carnage was obviously intended to be a graphical showcase of the hardware. For the most part it fails at this job. The characters are the most impressive part of the engine. Most of them are huge, and they have different body parts that animate independently from one another. It’s pretty impressive to be honest. Unfortunately the game uses scaling every chance it gets with most of the special moves taking advantage of the foreground. Unfortunately the art is just dreadful. The characters look like they were designed by a twelve year old. I mean that in the worst way possible. Additionally the backgrounds are incredibly plain. You would expect them to come up with at least something interesting given the sci-fi based scenario, but ultimately they failed to do so.
Easily the worst offense as far as graphics are concerned is the over use of color. I understand that developers were heavily restricted with the Sega Genesis, but they just plain went crazy here. The soundtrack is also very poor. The music sounds like your typical Genesis fare, but there’s absolutely nothing memorable. I barely even remembered that Cosmic Carnage had a soundtrack at all, and I’ve played through it as nearly every character. Aesthetically the game fails to show off the 32X.
