Somebody described the base game as a baked potato with just salt and butter, good, basic, but needs more, and after a handful of plays I completely agree. It’s fun straight out of the box, the dice-drafting for movement and combat is quick and tactile and the whole thing has genuine table presence, plastic cars, helicopters, road hazard tiles everywhere, but the ceiling is noticeably lower until you add the Choppe Shoppe or Carnage expansions, at which point the whole system opens up in ways the base box only gestures at.
The atmosphere is doing a lot of heavy lifting and doing it well, this is Deathrace 2000 as a board game, and it commits fully, road hazards flinging cars off the map, helicopters strafing the field, a rule about not shooting on the first turn that apparently matters a lot more than it sounds like it should, one reviewer basically dared me to ask them why they know. I haven’t tested that particular lesson myself yet but I believe them.
The real weak point is what happens when a car gets eliminated early. More than one review flagged the same problem, a player who’s out is just sitting around waiting for the table to finish, which is a real design cost in a game whose whole appeal is chaos and pace. It doesn’t ruin a session, but it’s the kind of thing you plan around, keep the player count and the expansions calibrated so eliminations don’t happen too early or too often.
Luck runs high, instant deaths from a bad damage token flip are a real complaint and a fair one if you want your outcomes to track your decisions closely. I don’t mind it here. This isn’t a game I’m bringing to the table for a tight strategic experience, it’s a beer and pretzel game in the best sense, loud, fast, funny, the kind of thing you can teach a total non-gamer in ten minutes and still have a blast with hardcore gamers the next round.