The Next Car Game

Anyone that knows me, knows that one of my favourite driving games is the destruction derby series, I’ve always been looking for a decent modern day replacement. While some games have derby modes and add-ons (sometimes paid DLC grr), there’s never been a whole game based around automotive carnage. The closest a game has come would have to be the Burnout series, though still not quite the same thing.

the cars bend and twist appropriately to impacts…

I’ve recently come across the aptly titled Next Car Game, available as an early access title on Steam. Now I can safely say this is a destruction derby game down to a T, even so much as the small damage indicator being identical. It’s not all about high speed antics here, it’s all about battling off other cars either in a ring or a simple track.

It’s very early access so you only get the choice of two cars, with the derby or three different tracks. So not a lot of features so far, but I’m finding myself going back to it time and time again. There’s nothing quite as much fun as watching 20 odd cars piling into each other at the start of a destruction derby.

One of the key features of the game is the soft body dynamics on all the cars. What this means to you and I is that the cars bend and twist appropriately to impacts. Now this makes car damage absolutely phenomenal, I’ve not seen collision damage like this before in a game. There is a downside here however, take a large impact and your front wheels can be pushed back into the car… You would think this would make the car totalled and no longer driveable, but it still goes. So sometimes the damage can go too far and seem a little unrealistic in that sense.

It’s not limited to just the cars, anything in the world can be damaged realistically. Smash into the concrete wall in the derby and layers of concrete crumble away in a realistic fashion. Drive through a wooden sign on the side of the track and it splinters and breaks in a satisfying way. Everything in the world can be damaged realistically. It really does feel like a dynamic world.

Hopefully BugBear, the developers behind Next Car Game turn this into an exciting full game with time, hopefully moving it to consoles eventually as well. For the time being this is only available on Steam, you’ll need a fairly decent computer to run it smoothly as well, it is just about playable on my old rig.