Film Review #29: Next Car Game (the game itself, as of now: EARLY ALPHA)

The actual game is… a different story.  Don’t get me wrong; it’s awesome as hell.  Still, it’s got a ways to go (it’s still in Alpha, so duh).

The game features demolition derbies and races on a figure-8, a gravel track, and a tarmac track, with controllable lap and AI counts plus track reversability.  You can use 3 cars, all with customizable paint jobs and parts which actually affect the car’s function, from horsepower to wheel type.  There’s also a sick cinematic camera with Depth of Field, for all your fancy obliterated-cars-and-lens-flares needs, and several camera modes, from a chase cam to a driver cam to a hood cam to a bumper cam.

To me, the racing is pretty tough— the AI drivers are unrelenting, and driving is precarious, with cars prone to spin-outs.  However, most people seem to embrace it as a fair challenge, so it’s probably just me and my own inability behind the wheel.  The destruction is beautiful as ever, but given the relatively (to the tech demo) tame nature of the forces inflicting destruction— just your standard smashing cars and guard rails, no giant flailing metal spiders— it doesn’t seem to be fully utilized.

Also, the damage-to-car-functionality is lacking: each part of the car (back-right, left door, front-right, engine, etc) has a damage node which registers “damage”.  If one of these nodes maxes out the car is broken.  The real trouble is the damage-reading system is inaccurate, and will often distribute “damage” to the wrong parts of the car.  Don’t get me wrong— in terms of visuals and physical meshes, it’s still just as brilliant as before.  It just seems that the system for perceiving this damage and affecting the engine’s functionality is broken.  Luckily, they’ve addressed the issue, and are apparently working now on a much better, accurate system.

Obviously, the game lacks content at this point, but one must remember that it’s in early alpha.  Everything is still in the works; there’s a great deal being developed and there will be such for quite a while.  I can’t wait to see what they do with it, and I really, REALLY hope they integrate some more insane car-wrecking machines into some new maps.  That’d be nice.

Again, their dev blog:
http://nextcargame.com/blog/