Obliteracers

My Saturday night crew has a rule: if a game can survive four slightly-tired adults, mismatched controllers, and someone insisting on using their phone as a gamepad, it earns a permanent spot in the rotation. Obliteracers earned that spot. This is a same-screen combat racer where crossing a finish line is completely irrelevant. The goal is destruction, and the round-based structure means nobody sits out long before they are back in the fray firing missiles, dropping mines, laying oil slicks, or triggering a shockwave that clears a radius around your car. Eight weapon types total, all of them satisfying in a cartoonish, physics-driven way. The camera mechanic is the biggest thing that separates Obliteracers from the Mario Kart comparisons it inevitably attracts. A single shared camera tracks whoever is leading the pack, and if you fall out of frame, you are eliminated. It plays closer to the old Micro Machines school of screen-edge elimination than a traditional kart racer, and that single design choice generates some genuinely unhinged moments when twelve people are bunched at the front doing anything to avoid the back of the screen. The four game modes, Survival, Knockout, Endurance, and Leader, each bend the incentives in slightly different ways. Leader mode, where only the racer in first place scores kills, creates paranoid front-running tension that flips the usual dynamic entirely. Toss in gameplay modifiers like disguised power-ups, ramped damage for losing racers, or the pinball modifier that detonates your car on contact, and you have a surprisingly deep customisation layer sitting under a very silly surface. Hardware flexibility is genuinely impressive for an indie title at this price point. Spare laptops, tablets, and smartphones can connect over local Wi-Fi as controllers, which in practice means you can field a full lobby without a drawer full of gamepads. The career mode runs 24 events across four location types, including a sky-high cloud-mining city, a desert minefield, a tropical coast, and an ocean freighter, but it functions more as a structured tutorial for multiplayer than a compelling solo campaign. It runs short and the AI, while useful for filling numbers, is noticeably less chaotic than a room full of humans. Bots can be slotted into any lobby to pad player counts, which helps if your group is small. The honest weakness here is longevity outside a group setting. Online multiplayer exists but the player base has thinned considerably since launch, and there is no automated matchmaking to compensate. Finding a populated lobby is largely a matter of luck or coordination. The track variety, four locations with three layout variants each making twelve circuits total, starts to feel thin once the novelty of the camera system wears off. Some reviewers also flagged that at the maximum sixteen-player count, the shared camera makes it genuinely hard to locate your own car in the scrum, and that frustration is real. Four to eight players hits the sweet spot where chaos and legibility coexist comfortably. For the couch crowd, though, the value proposition is strong. Controllers on PC require minimal fuss, the round-based respawn system means a knocked-out player is back within seconds, and the sheer silliness of a weapons-first race where being in first place actually makes you a bigger target lands every time with a new group. Obliteracers is not a game for anyone who wants a deep career structure or a living online community. It is a game for the people who want something running on a big TV in twenty seconds, with rules simple enough to explain mid-pizza-slice.

Riley · Scout Team

Sports & racing

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