ShockRods

I came into ShockRods genuinely curious. The Carmageddon pedigree, the promise of late-90s arena shooter DNA wrapped in a vehicle skin, a railgun and rocket launcher pickups scattered across six maps - that pitch lands well on paper. The reality is a game that can't decide what it wants to be, and the confusion bleeds into every system. The first thing that trips you up is the movement model. These cars don't drive like cars. They strafe sideways, reverse at full speed, stop on a dime - basically a Quake player model with a car texture slapped on top. There's no weight, no power-sliding, no momentum to punish or reward. If you came here hoping for Twisted Metal energy, you're going to feel robbed. If you can accept it as a third-person arena shooter with a vehicle aesthetic, the weapon pickups at least hit some familiar notes: minigun, rocket launcher, grenade launcher, and oddities like the Freeze Gun and Balloon Cannon give matches a bit of chaos. Multi-directional boosters and a double-jump add some vertical play, which is the one mechanical wrinkle that genuinely differentiates it from just being Quake with wheels. The mode list is thin: Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, Capture the Flag, Shockball (a team ball-carry mode with combat), and Golden Ram (a juggernaut variant where you fight over a oversized front-mounted ram). Five modes across six maps is not a lot of content, and the bot AI is bad enough to make offline play feel like a chore. Reviewers noted bots circling walls on loop in Deathmatch and deliberately ignoring the flag objective in CTF. Bots like that don't teach you the game and they don't keep you entertained while you wait for real players to show up. The map design has its own problems too - several arenas feel oversized for the actual player count, with most combat funneling into small choke areas while the rest of the layout sits empty. The core issue, though, is population. ShockRods launched into a market that wasn't waiting for it, and the playerbase never materialized. That's a death sentence for a multiplayer-focused arena game at a premium price point. All the cosmetic progression - car bodies, colour schemes, wheel combos, kill effects, taunts, all earned through in-game currency with no pay-to-win hooks, to the devs' credit - means nothing when you're grinding them out against bots who can barely navigate a straight line. The UI also drew criticism for feeling like a mobile port rather than a PC product, which tracks given the game did ship simultaneously on Apple Arcade. ShockRods is not broken in the way some early-access disasters are broken. The shooting is functional, the framerate is stable, and mouse-and-keyboard input is reportedly the intended control scheme. But functional and fun are different things, and without a live community to play against, the gap between them is impossible to close. If you ever get a full 6v6 or 12-player lobby going, there's probably a decent twenty-minute time-killer in here. Getting to that lobby is the hard part in 2025. Fred, Scout Team