

They clearly don't want to take away the thrill of discovery.


Up in the Alps, there are mysterious runes to decipher, and puzzles to figure out. It's an interesting collision of exploration and puzzles, and I think the developers are using Early Access in this case to balance how obtuse they can be against usability, though there is content missing as well. birdy, and can be surprisingly cut-throat. It feels lovely to soar through the sky, occasionally beating your wings to skim along the treeline, or tapping the dive button. It's a 2D exploration game about being a bird in the Alps. Other than that, the content matches the cheap price, it's perfectly playable, and I bet if you put a four year-old down in front of it they'd laugh like a drain.Įven in that company, Secrets Of Raetikon is an oddity. I want to nudge those angles and make beautiful and broken ragdoll art. Tight now when you finish a level, it allows you to rewatch it in normal and slow-motion, but the camera is fixed on the vehicle and/or the player, and it's begging to be freed. The developer has promised more of everything in the coming months, but if I had one suggestion it would be a more complete replay mode. The goal is to climb the leaderboard by creating spectacular crashes with your little crash test dummy: broken wheels and broken bones drop points like floppy ragdolls. It's so casual and cheap that it already feels full, with ten levels (ranging from roads to missile launch pads), nine vehicles, a number of poses, and an editor that allows you to add and change elements to the current levels. It's one of the stranger Early Access games.
TURBO DISMOUNT FREE PLAY DEMO DRIVER
What's missing from the current build of Next Car Game is FlatOut's driver tossing crash modes, but you can find something similar in Turbo Dismount - a game about torturing a ragdoll driver by revving up a vehicle and releasing it into obstacles. It resembles a demo, but what is here is a lot of fun, and shows just how serious BugBear are being with their ridiculous car game. You can swap out tyres and engines, and flick the toggles for gears, traction control, anti-spin, and ABS. The two cars are plucked from disparate ends of the muscle/speed spectrum, one resembling a large mini (I do not know cars), and the other filling the American muscle monster category. The three-track selection includes gravel and tarmac race tracks and a destruction derby arena. It is a little slim on content, with two cars, three tracks, and not much else. I've no idea how they managed that, and because of those funding hurdles, I didn't expect NCG to arrive quite so speedily. It's been on quite a journey to get here: a cancelled crowd-funding effort somehow shifted gears into a incredibly successful pre-order campaign. It's incredibly low-fi, and actually feels like it'd work well in Next Car Game's engine, but has its own quirky personality, as does Secrets Of Raetikon, which doesn't have cars, but is a fine calming influence after the noise of all that mangled steel. Turbo Dismount skidded in as well, a strange game about setting up crashes and watching the aftermath. Though it lands on Steam with plenty of room in the boot, what's there is a lot of fun.

TURBO DISMOUNT FREE PLAY DEMO SERIES
They make an interesting pairing: Next Car Game is from the makers of the good FlatOut games, a series that understood the joy of carnage. Two games about crashing vehicles popped up on Steam Early Access this week.
