Turbo Sloths

I've spent enough time with combat racers to know the genre is basically a ghost town right now, so when something like Turbo Sloths rolls in claiming the Wasteland League crown, my ears perk up. This is a PC-only indie from Cyprus-based RainStyle Games, and it sits somewhere between the destruction-first attitude of Twisted Metal and the off-road grunt of MotorStorm, wrapped in a genuinely bizarre post-apocalyptic skin where your drivers are literally anthropomorphic sloths piloting massive turbocharged trucks called Turbojunks. That sentence alone should tell you whether this game is for you. The combat-racing loop is the main event. You load out your Turbojunk with turbines, overdrive systems, and weapon upgrades, then hurl it into circuit sprints, point-to-point races, an Arena mode built around survival carnage, and a story campaign that includes actual boss fights. Weapons litter the tracks alongside concrete roadblocks, exploding barrels, and turrets you can tear through. Dynamic weather - rain, fog, day-night shifts - tweaks handling in ways that keep things from going entirely on autopilot. Quick Race mode lets newcomers skip the career faff and get into the action immediately, which matters a lot for couch sessions. The split-screen local multiplayer is confirmed and, honestly, is probably the best reason to buy this. Four people yelling at each other while giant sloth-trucks trade railgun shots is the kind of low-cost chaos that's hard to put a number on. The tone is aggressively weird in the best way. There is a drone companion that flies around your vehicle, occasionally shoots at things, and will momentarily blind you with its camera flash mid-race - genuinely hard to tell if that is satire or not, but it works. The soundtrack pulls from ten bands, giving it that old FlatOut energy where the music actually matches the carnage on screen. Variety across race types is solid, and the game received a post-launch seasonal update adding snow-covered tracks with snowmen as obstacles, which tells you a lot about the development philosophy here: lean into the weird, keep adding stuff. Here is where I have to be straight with you, though. This is an indie debut, and it shows. The different Turbojunk vehicles look quite similar to one another visually, making it hard to track which is which during upgrades. Asset pop-in is noticeable even on higher-end hardware. Controller support has a known conflict between Steam Input and the game's own gamepad driver - you will need to disable Steam Input manually in properties to get a pad working cleanly, which is an annoying hoop to jump through for a game built around local multiplayer. On the plus side, the difficulty slider is accessible, and the handling on straights is forgiving enough that casual players won't rage-quit immediately, though tight corners can send you spinning with a single tap from another racer. The Steam community sits at a Very Positive rating across around 100 reviews, which is encouraging for a game this niche. For the couch-tournament crowd I organize every Saturday, Turbo Sloths earns a cautious recommendation. It is rough, it is strange, and controller setup needs a few minutes of fiddling before the first race. But the split-screen chaos, the weapon variety, and the sheer commitment to its own absurd premise make it a worthy pickup for anyone mourning the death of the extreme combat racer as a genre.

Riley · Scout Team

Sports & racing

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