Chaos on Wheels

I went in expecting shovelware and came out surprised, which is a low bar to clear but still counts for something. Chaos on Wheels is vehicular combat built on the bones of early-2000s arena shooters, specifically in the vein of Twisted Metal and Vigilante 8, and the developers at Acodeon will tell you as much. The concept is simple: strap rockets, machine guns, and gadgets to a heavily armored car, drop into an arena packed with enemy vehicles, turrets, and environmental hazards, and survive. The Chaos Garage lets you fill up to five vehicle slots, swap out front guns, bolt on different armor types, add a radar, and upgrade ammo capacity, and that loop of earning currency, spending it on upgrades, and taking slightly nastier hardware into the next fight is genuinely satisfying when the moment-to-moment combat clicks. The ten-chapter campaign tells a thin but functional story about a rogue AI called Helios, who has taken control of the world's infrastructure and whose primary weapon of choice, apparently, is an army of stationary turrets. That last part is the campaign's biggest problem. Too many missions reduce to pulling into an arena, shooting fixed emplacements until they explode, and moving on. Enemy cars do show up, and those encounters are where the game actually earns its name, but they are spread too thinly across chapters that otherwise feel like target practice. Spongy turret health compounds the tedium, and the AI-controlled cars have a habit of getting wedged on scenery. The campaign is playable, but it is not the main event. The local split-screen modes, covering deathmatch, team deathmatch, and the sandbox-style Chaos format, are where this game lives. Pile two people in front of one monitor with controllers and the chaos descriptor stops being marketing and starts being accurate. Movement has enough slide to it that reading opponent trajectories matters, and with rockets, missiles, and spread bullets all crossing the screen simultaneously, positional awareness makes a real difference. Each driver carries a unique ability, ranging from standard nitro boosts and shields to more distinctive tricks, which adds a light layer of character selection strategy before matches. The game does feel slower than it should, and a proper sense of speed would do a lot to push sessions from fun to frantic, but the foundation is there. On the technical side, there is no online multiplayer at launch, which in 2025 is a limitation worth knowing upfront. The game is local-only, and outside of the Career mode there is no ranked anything. For a shooter specialist, that stings. The visual presentation is modest, carrying what one preview called an early-2000s charm, which is a polite way of saying the assets are basic. Voice acting from drivers is frequent to a fault and gets repetitive fast. The dev team has been active through the Early Access period, making the game meaningfully less grindy and easier to approach than its original build, so there is genuine support behind this title, even if the sample size of Steam reviews is still small and sitting in mixed territory. If you have a regular split-screen buddy and a hunger for vehicular combat that nobody else is currently feeding at this price point, Chaos on Wheels delivers enough mechanical fun to justify the session. Solo players grinding through the campaign will hit the repetition wall faster. No netcode to benchmark here, no ranked ladder to complain about, just two controllers and a room full of explosions.

Fred · Scout Team

Shooters

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