Defunct

I put about three hours into Defunct before I realised I'd been chasing a single time-trial medal the whole time, ignoring dinner. That's the clearest signal I can give you about whether the core loop works. You play a broken-down wheel-robot stranded on a post-human Earth, and your motor is shot, so the only way to move at any satisfying speed is to master the Gravitize engine: trigger it on a downhill slope and you build momentum fast, hit it going uphill and you bleed speed just as quickly. It sounds simple because it is simple, and that simplicity is exactly what makes the first hour so disarming. The mechanical vocabulary is tight. Gravitize handles downhill acceleration. A separate Magnetize ability lets you stick to inverted surfaces and ride upside-down stretches. Enerjuice pickups scattered across the 11 levels give you a short burst of raw speed when the terrain isn't cooperating. Bounce pads launch you into the air, wall-run sections reward committed speed lines, and loop-the-loops exist purely to make you grin. None of this is explained beyond the basics, which is fine, because the physics teach you more in thirty seconds of play than any tooltip ever could. The controls do have a learning-curve spike at the start, and several reviewers noted the same wall: strange on paper, awkward in the first few minutes, then suddenly everything clicks and you can't stop. Stick with it past that friction point or you're leaving the best of the game on the table. The obvious comparison that floats around the community is a better-executed version of what modern Sonic games keep trying and failing to do: marry genuine high speed with 3D traversal without losing player control. Defunct mostly pulls it off. When the flow state arrives and you're chaining slope acceleration into a bounce-pad launch into a magnetized ceiling section, it genuinely feels like downhill skiing crossed with a pinball machine. The two moments where it stumbles are when the physics jitter on awkward geometry, producing the kind of brief juddering halt that kills momentum in the worst possible way, and when the game simply ends. The story wraps abruptly, and at a roughly one-hour pace through the main path, some players will feel short-changed before the time-trial layer has fully revealed itself. That time-trial layer is where the real mileage lives. Each level supports bronze, silver, gold, and platinum rankings, some requiring pure speed runs to the exit and others demanding you collect robot batteries along the way. There is a legitimate speedrun community around the game, with sub-30-minute full-run attempts documented and a Speedrun.com page in active use. Unlockable skins and tricks give completionists a secondary checklist. So the total picture is: roughly one hour of story content, and then however many hours you're willing to spend shaving seconds off level times. For score-attack players and anyone who enjoys the optimisation loop, that's actually a solid value proposition. For someone who wants a meaty narrative or multiplayer, this is a solo-only, short-runtime game and that's not going to change. Hardware note: Defunct is controller-compatible and honestly benefits from an analogue trigger for the Gravitize input. Keyboard works but analogue control over your gravity application is noticeably more satisfying. No wheel or HOTAS support exists or is needed. This is a couch-and-gamepad title, strictly a solo experience, so don't buy it expecting to drag friends in for a session. Buy it if you want a weird, focused physics toy with a genuine speedrunning ceiling and a robot protagonist who communicates entirely through body language and engine noises.

Riley · Scout Team

Sports & racing

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