Overpass 2 - Career Starter Pack

I want to warn you upfront: if you sat down with four friends expecting a chaotic split-screen UTV brawl, Overpass 2 will test your friendships. This is a game where crawling over a boulder at 4 mph while managing your rear-wheel, four-wheel, and differential lock settings is the intended loop, and it expects you to find that satisfying. Whether you do or not will determine pretty much everything about your experience. The three vehicle categories - UTVs, ATVs, and the newly added Rock Bouncers - each handle differently across five race types: off-road sprint, off-road circuit, hill climb, obstacle course, and closed circuit. Rock Bouncers, the big addition over the original, are reinforced cage-on-wheels machines built for bouncing off the nastiest terrain, and they are genuinely the most interesting things to pilot here. The career mode wraps all of this in familiar team management trappings: hire staff, sign sponsors, run R&D, keep your vehicles from falling apart between rounds. It is functional and reasonably deep, though the management layer can feel thin compared to what dedicated motorsport management titles offer. Multiplayer exists both online (up to 8 players) and via split-screen, which is a real point in the game's favour for couch sessions, even if the core game is a tough sell for casual crowds. Here is where it gets complicated. The physics-first premise only works when the controls cooperate, and they frequently do not. Reviewers and players have widely flagged input lag on the analogue stick, where a turn command arrives a beat after you issued it. On slow, deliberate obstacle courses that is merely frustrating. On switchback hill climbs it can send you backwards down a mountain you spent two minutes climbing. The camera compounds things, locking into odd angles after a crash and requiring manual correction mid-event. These are not minor annoyances baked into a difficulty curve; they are technical shortcomings that the sequel carried over from the original without meaningful resolution. Visually, the Unreal Engine 5 underpinning shows up in flashes - a desert sandstorm mid-race, some decent vehicle model detail - but the broader environments read as flat and under-textured for a 2023 release, which most reviewers noted bluntly. Who is this actually for, then? Genuine off-road motorsport fans who appreciate the precision-over-speed discipline will find more here than the Mixed Steam rating suggests. The drive-train switching mechanic does click once you internalise it, and conquering a rocky hill climb cleanly gives a satisfaction you will not get from a kart racer. But that audience is small, and Overpass 2 does almost nothing to grow it. The AI runs inconsistently, the tutorial overstays its welcome, and casual racing players expecting anything resembling the energy of Forza or The Crew will bounce off this hard within the first hour. As a couch co-op option it is a curio at best - split-screen is there, but "is it fun for four friends" gets a qualified no unless all four already know what an obstacle-course UTV race involves. At a sale price, the adventurous niche player might find something worth their time. At full price, most people would be better served looking elsewhere.

Riley · Scout Team

Sports & racing

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