Post Apocalyptic Mayhem

I've been chasing that Twisted Metal high on PC for years, and Post Apocalyptic Mayhem (PAM) is the closest a budget indie has come to scratching it - without quite landing the scratch. Steel Monkeys built a kill-focused vehicular combat game that wears racing clothes: you do laps, sure, but matches end on a timer and your score is entirely kill-based, so actually racing well will just drag you away from the carnage and lose you points. Once you wrap your head around that, there is genuine chaos to enjoy. The roster is the strongest argument for giving PAM a chance. You get a solid lineup of distinct war-machines, each carrying three weapon slots - front, side, and rear - loaded with some genuinely silly ideas. The Logger drops spinning sawblades on swing-arms to chew up anything flanking it. The Ice Scream truck pelts opponents with explosive snow cones fired from a front-mounted penguin. The Kitty with Claws deploys clouds of noxious perfume that scramble enemy controls. Weapons are picked up as colour-coded barrel power-ups scattered across the tracks, which keeps the moment-to-moment loop snappy and accessible. There is no tutorial, but the controller mapping is intuitive enough that anyone who has played a kart racer can be competitive within one race - great news if your Saturday night crowd has low tolerance for learning curves. And yes, a gamepad is strongly recommended here; keyboard play is workable but the floaty physics feel much better on a stick. The problems stack up fast once the novelty wears off. Single-player comes down to two modes: Arcade, where you pick a car and track and grind kills against AI for five minutes, and Apocalyptic Challenge, which is just that same race repeated across all tracks in sequence. The AI never really pressures you - the optimal strategy on every difficulty is to pull ahead, slow down, wait for the pack, then dump your rear weapon. That loop gets stale after a couple of runs. The track count, even with the post-launch additions integrated into the base game, remains slim: Wasteland, Concrete Jungle, Cold War Beach, Airplane Graveyard, Death Area 8, and Abandoned Sawmill. Six tracks for a game where the core loop repeats on every map is a real content ceiling. Critics at launch hammered it for this, and the 44 Metacritic score reflects a game that launched undercooked. Multiplayer is where the genuine fun lives, and where the "four drunk friends" test gets complicated. Online six-player matches can be genuinely chaotic in a good way, with the wacky weapon variety creating the kind of accidental highlight-reel moments that make a game memorable. The reported split-screen support for local play is a nice bonus for couch sessions. The catch: the online community is basically a ghost town at this point. Finding a populated lobby requires either coordinating with people you already know or getting lucky. If you can guarantee three or four friends in the same session, there are real laughs to be had here. If you are counting on matchmaking to fill the lobby, temper expectations hard. PAM is the definition of a game that needed more time and content to be something special. The vehicle designs are creative, the pick-up weapon system is immediately readable, and the chaos ceiling in a full lobby is legitimately fun. But the thin single-player, the repetitive race structure, and a dormant online scene mean your enjoyment depends almost entirely on whether you can bring your own crowd.

Riley · Scout Team

Sports & racing

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