BeamNG.drive is a driving game with racetracks and rally courses and real-looking cars and the veneer of respectability. But it’s really just about murdering cars.
Sure, you might race around a track or two—the game includes actual racecourses—and find that in its Early Access state these events are a little empty, a little boring.
But then you notice stuff. The game lets you spawn cannons. One of the pre-loaded scenarios has a picture of a van jumping a chasm. And then you crash a car, and everything begins to change.
Your journey from car driver to car killer goes like this. First, you might screw up a driving challenge, crash and think, hey, that looks neat.
Next, you might run into a concrete pillar and think, boy, that would have killed every human inside the car if there’d been any humans inside the car. Pretty rad that the car is still driving, though. Let’s do that again.
Then, you find a little game mode that involves throwing a 4WD off a cliff and seeing if it can make it to the bottom.
Or, you might find that the game has its own environment settings, allowing you to adjust the gravity from “moon” to “sun”.
And then you never drive a car around a racetrack again. You spend hours, days, just plotting ways to destroy cars in as spectacular and macabre way as possible.
You’re a killer. And you’re loving every second of it.
BeamNG.drive is currently in Early Access on Steam. The devs say it’s a “dynamic soft-body physics vehicle simulator capable of doing just about anything.” Right now that only includes fun crashes, not fun races, but if the second half of that equation materialises over the coming months this will be just the thing to vent those evil car fantasies with.