The reason players can position ramps and helicopters is that, aside from the handful of cars and tracks the game comes with, it also has an in-built level editor that can be brought up at any time by pressing F11. Dropping the speed down into slow-motion and leaning in to lust over every flapping piece of protruding metal makes me wonder if I'm inches away from becoming a JG Ballard character. It's a wonderful toybox and ramming your toys together seems only natural, just as it is in any open world game with vehicles, but the physics system here makes it utterly fascinating to watch. Everything reacts accordingly, as rotor blades snap, fenders bend, doors flap open, exhausts swirl loose. Players position ramps, then plop a hovering helicopter at one end of it, then crash pickup trucks into that helicopter in mid-air. This is an immediate source of hours of fun and YouTube is full of videos more impressive than the above. You can listen to their fine podcast here.) (With apologies to the cast of the Daft Souls podcast, which I was listening to and unknowingly recording at the time.

That means it can move independently of all the other parts and move in more natural ways. Instead, each part of your vehicle, whether it car, plane or helicopter, is a separate, soft body physics object. The difference is that BeamNG does more than just dent a rigid model to increasing degrees. Yes, damage is no new thing in the racing genre, and games have made it a primary feature since at least as long ago as the original Burnout.

If you haven't seen BeamNG damage modelling yet, then you likely haven't seen anything quite like it in games. What the additions so far have brought is something unexpected: the fear of crashing two or more objects together.

drive suffix to its name and is on its way towards becoming an ambitious, robust driving simulator, with umpteen cars, tracks and an an open world mode.įor now, the joys of BeamNG are what they always were: crashing two or more objects together and watching them split apart in glorious detail. What started as a physics prototype that rendered cars with soft body physics has gained the. That's what BeamNG.drive offers in its current incarnation. Bending, twisting, crumpling, crunching metal.

Cars crashing beamng drive