I’m splitting my review of Next Car Game in its entirety into two reviews, simply because the tech demo is something on its own.
So, when a game is first announced, and while it’s in development, some developers release to the public— whether for free or through preorder,etc.— some sort of demo to give them an idea what they’re making.
Bugbear Entertainment released a tech demo to show off the hyper-optimized physics/destruction engine they’d developed for their WIP game “Next Car Game” (supposedly a working title, as that is apparently what they “name” all their unnamed games before something comes to mind, though it seems to be sticking). And guess what: it’s goddamn amazing. Amazing.
The player plays as a weathered American muscle car among a sea of other beater cars in a playground of pure car-obliterating chaos: giant hammers, massive metal spiders, car grinders, trial courses, tons of massive jumps, loops, basketball hoops, building-sized cannons, destructible buildings/structures, jet turbines, and more. Just insane, really.
Basically, you drive around and smash other cars, the environment, and yourself to pieces. Debris piles up, wheels roll about distorted and unconnected to anything identifiably a car (nothing is, really, after a couple minutes), and the player slowly turns his/her car into a small, tatterdemalion cube, with perhaps some misshapen wheel protruding from where the engine used to be. Or something. The player can, of course, press E to repair the car, or R to reset its position to something navigable (instead of, say, upside down at the bottom of a pit of blenders).
Now, the physics: they are awesome. Awesome. This is, of course, conjecture, based off observation and my own limited knowledge of game development, keep in mind. The vehicle distortion system is not fully, constantly soft-body— that is, it isn’t constantly acting like some extremely plasticine piece of jello. Rather, impacts cause the car to calculate distortions in its mesh. In this sense it is still very realistic, as most games that have tried to simulate constant soft-body meshing tend up to produce utterly cloth- or jello-like vehicles, which are, ostensibly, not very realistic relative to actual metal vehicles. Plus, this approach— NOT the jello approach— runs much faster, if managed properly. Needless to say, Bugbear has managed to pull it off brilliantly. Car destruction looks amazing most of the time, and when it doesn’t it’s just ridiculous— which is kinda an element of the game, or the tech demo, anyway. Vehicle physics AND visual meshes are distorted by impact, along with functions— that is, wheels will continue to turn, if only in their new position on the car, which frankly ends up being just about anywhere. If you smash your car properly, it’ll simply be a smaller version, still drivable, steering and all. Not realistic, but hey, it’s the tech demo. The actual game is different, with more accurate destruction-based function degradation.
Now, gameplay itself, opinion-wise:
Very fun. Car handles well, drifts in an easy, controllable manner; it’s fun to see how long you can actually keep the thing under control just driving it around and smashing it to bits. Smashing into the environment or other cars is tons of fun. Plus, the game has a “physics cannon”- you can fire rockets, black holes, giant spheres of doom, more or less everything in the environment, and more at whatever you want with controllable force, either from a flying free-cam or from the front of the car. It’s… insane. Tons of fun, especially given there is a free more limited tech demo available on their site, which is just like, hot damn, GET IT. For PC, that is; not for anything else at this time.
Oh, and graphics. The graphics are unbeatable. Probably. Realtime raytraced reflections? No, sorry, you lose, Next Car Game wins. Runs INCREDIBLY fast, too— the physics and graphics engines can be pushed to ridiculous extents without any FPS hit.
Now, their dev blog:
http://nextcargame.com/blog/
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