Screw Drivers

The store page promises slapstick physics and flat-out racing, and it delivers both, just not in the ratio I was picturing. I assumed a racer with a building gimmick bolted onto the front. What I actually got is a construction game that happens to hold races, and the race is mostly the test bench where you learn that your beautiful six-wheeled brick understeers into the first hairpin and lands on its roof. Once I stopped treating the track as the main event and started treating it as feedback, everything clicked into place. If you want something you can pick up and drive, this is not that. If you want to fail spectacularly and then go fix the reason you failed, it absolutely is. The loop is simple to describe and much harder to master: combine building blocks with mechanical parts until you have a drivetrain that puts power on the ground instead of throwing your creation into a barrel roll. Where the motor sits, how the gearing is set up, which wheels actually get drive, how much of your chassis is dead weight you added because it looked cool. All of it shows up in the handling within about ten seconds of the green light. Racing for gold unlocks new parts, so progression is essentially a growing catalogue of things to bolt on, and the temptation to over-engineer is constant. My best vehicle was not my most elaborate one. It was the ugly, low, boring one I built after three failures, and that is a good sign for a game like this. Hardware-wise, keep expectations sensible. This is a PC release and the building side is mouse work, so you are living in the editor with a keyboard under your hands. I would not go bolting a force feedback wheel to the desk for it either. You are not chasing apexes in a licensed GT car, you are wrestling a homemade contraption whose weight balance you invented forty seconds ago, and a gamepad handles that chaos more gracefully than a 900-degree rim ever will. Controller in hand, mouse for the garage, that is the setup I would recommend to anyone starting out. Here is where I have to temper the enthusiasm, because I run co-op nights and I check for this first. The multiplayer on offer is online player versus player, and I found no sign of split-screen or couch play. That is the one thing I genuinely wanted here, because watching four people simultaneously discover that their creations cannot turn left would be the funniest thing in my living room all year. Instead you get the online version of that, which is still good chaos when your group is coordinated on voice, but it is not the same as passing a controller down the sofa. The Workshop support softens the blow a little, since sharing and downloading builds means you can race friends' machines even when they are offline, and browsing other people's absurd engineering is entertainment in its own right. The rough edges are the ones you would expect from a physics-heavy indie. The same simulation that produces the comedy also produces the frustration, and there are moments where a run dies to a collision that feels arbitrary rather than instructive. The editor takes a while to stop fighting you, and the early hours can feel like homework if you came purely for the driving. Steam sentiment sits in Very Positive territory with a solid majority of thousands of reviews on side, and the minority complaints line up with what I hit: fiddly building, occasional physics nonsense, a learning curve that assumes you enjoy iteration. This is a young release from a small studio, so I would expect the sharp bits to get sanded down over time, but review it as it plays today and it asks for patience before it gives back. Who should get it: tinkerers, Trailmakers and Besiege types, anyone whose favourite part of a racing game was always the setup screen. Who should skip it: players who want clean circuit racing, and anyone shopping specifically for a local multiplayer party game, because that box is not ticked. For everyone in between, budget an evening to be bad at it before you judge it. The moment your first genuinely good build hooks up out of a corner and pulls away, you will understand why the review score is where it is.

Riley · Scout Team

Sports & racing

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