Most people can tell if a game is good or bad from playing it for a short while, but what if you wanted to break it down and figure out what specifically makes the game good or bad?  You could have a punch list and put little check marks or ratings in each box.  But what are the criteria?  Story, Gameplay, Control, Visuals, Sound, Replayability? It's hard to apply the same rating system to different types of games.  It would depend greatly on the kind of game you are playing.  All games should be fun.  This can be a bit of an intangible as all of the pieces of the game, good and/or bad, come together to make up the overall experience.  Let's take a look at the parts of Cosmic Carnage as they are presented to us.



Back Story
The story is presented in a familiar screen crawl format in front of the standard Windows XP screensaver.  The story is easily my favorite part of Cosmic Carnage.  Please read the story aloud in your best ominous voice:


This story is amazing!  The beginning of the story is essentially Con-Air in space.  That probably could have been good enough.  The fighting could be a soft of Pit-Fighter esque intergalactic Fight Club but they went a step further.  The twist that leads to one escape pod is super awesome and got me immediately invested in the urgency of the story.  Unfortunately, this is where much of my joy with this game ended.

Player Select
There are 8 characters to select from.  Not to be too nitpicky here but there are 2 big problems with the character select screen.

1-The character names are not displayed while cycling through the fighters

This may seem like a small gripe and it wouldn't be that big of a problem in Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat where most of the characters are pretty well known and established but this is Cosmic Carnage. Character names are an important part of the story, which was exposed so well just one screen ago.  But now we don't even get a name?

2-The character models and head shots look nothing like each other

This is another seemingly small annoyance that sticks out like a sore Cosmic thumb.  Why do the head shots and player models looks like totally different creatures?  I was looking at the head shot while selecting my character for the first time and when I got into the fight, I thought the game made a mistake and gave me the wrong fighter.  I even checked to see if I was holding the controller that was plugged into the player 2 port.  It turns out that the original Japanese release, called Cyber Brawl, had an even 4/4 (military/prisoner) split but they had 3 of the human soldier characters  reskinned to aliens because Sega thought that the game would get Mortal Kombat style hate due to fatalities on humans.  If you are going through the trouble to re-skin a character, how hard is it to update the head shot?  It just seems lazy.



Gameplay
This is where the game falls apart for me.  To be fair, this is also the hardest part of a fighting game for a developer to "nail".  Fighting game experts can break down what makes a game "work" or "not work" but for me, all I can tell you is that it just doesn't "feel right."  It feels muddy.  It feel imprecise.  It feels generic. 

One of the "features" of the game is to dramatically zoom in when the fighting gets intense.  It is cool the first couple of times, but it is overused and gets old REALLY fast. This is also where quite a bit of the story falls apart for me.  The end of the story states that "the four survivors of each ship must fight".  If one ship was prisoners and the other was military, we should have 4 rag tag, dirty fighting, criminal aliens and 4 clean(er) cut and similarly uniformed military aliens.  We don't have that.  This has a lot to do with the earlier point of Sega re-skinning the 3 human characters into robots/aliens.


Remember those fatalities I mentioned earlier?  When a fight is over, all you have to do to finish you opponent with a fatality is to finished them off with a special move.  Any special move.  The fatalities are not different for each fighter.  One of three pre-determined things will happen if you end with a special move:

1-Your opponent's head separates from body;
2-Their head explodes; or
3-They are cut in half at the waist.

Also, the fights take place in 8 different locations specific to each fighter.  There are never any spectators, no crowds, and none of the other fighters are watching.  If eight Cosmic Carnagers all need to fight it out for the last escape pod, why would just 2 of them go off to a private place to fight?  For that matter, once it is down to 3 fighters left, why wouldn't the third fighter just take the escape pod while the other two are fighting?  I know there are plot holes in almost every game, but these are hard for me to look past, even if it is a silly fighting game.

The one redeeming part of the gameplay that I think is a great idea is the selection of different armor or parts before a fight begins.  Besides the obvious aspect of changing your character's aesthetics, the parts you choose determine which special moves your character can perform.  It is similar to choosing "type" in certain Capcom fighting games with the added realism of something physically on your character as opposed to Ryu deciding before a fight "You know, I'm gonna Hadouken this way and this way only during this next fight".

Ending

Spoiler alert

Every character has the same ending.  The same boring animation plays with an escape pod taking off leaving the destroyed spaceship behind.  The only difference is the small headshot of the winning player's character in the bottom right hand corner of the screen.  I know people don't typically play fighting games for story but it is the story of the characters that make you care about them.  Sorry to keep referring to Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter but they do it right.  This game doesn't.


Conclusion

At the end of the day, Cosmic Carnage is an interesting experiment and the only exclusive fighting game for the 32X.  It has a very interesting premise and some pretty good ideas, but bad execution holds almost every aspect of this game back.

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