After the body-horror post-apocalypse of Elite-like Vangery and before the RTS sterile esotericism of Perimeter, there was supposed to be another entry into the portfolio of the developer. A turn-based racing game, also set in the univang.
That game was never made, and all of the pre-production work was retooled into this cartoon childish comedy carting game. There’s the turn-based racing mode in it, and it does somehow take place in the univang.
After the long intro of a VO talking over static pictures, you are dropped right into the hub world where you pick one of the characters with their minor stats differences. You ride towards the first available race and you are offered a choice between the turn-based mode and the real-time mode.
So the turn based mode doesn’t work. First of all it’s not turn-based, it’s simultaneous turns with pause. The AI treats it like a real-time race and the turns do not influence its behaviour at all. So by picking the turn-based mode you just lose no matter what. The stupid mechanics do not compute. You draw the trajectory, unpause and an AI tries to follow your plan. The longer the distance between the planned nodes the faster your AI is supposed to go, but it can never go faster than the enemy. And as it’s simultaneous turns, the enemies will interrupt and obstruct your planned path. The combat actions also have no mechanics to react to the changes on the field. The arsenal is pretty generic and there are no conditional actions. And then your AI can overshoot your planned node, and start driving in circles trying to get to it. The unusual gameplay is so not working, that playing real-time-only is the only sane choice.
So what’s left is just a classic carting game with weapons. CTR, the Mario-themed ones, etc.
For a car you pick a resistance member, each having different stats. Despite fighting against the robots you always race only with each other. You can swap your character at any time in the lobby. Then you have three slots, which represent both your dismembered rayman cart parts, and the three spells you have during the race. I also have a suspicion that that choice influences the road grip and the speed, but there are no stats.
All the racing tracks are marked on tiny planetoids and all are extremely off-road and very short courses of 5 laps, filled with death pits and death spikes. When you are out of HP you explode, and then usually slowly re-assembled. If a bot explodes near you, you can mix-up your parts. Each race is absolutely unpredictable chaos. Everything is extremely RNG — one second you are leading, the next one the rubber-banding AI kills you, and while you are respawning for almost an entire minute you get lapped. The tracks get filled with traps and you barely can drive for ten second without getting into something nasty. Especially not with these, controls, with these physics, and these mechanics.
But to skip the low-agency random gameplay you get some currency for each race, as long as you wasn’t the last one to finish. Each race contains a new spell/cart part. You get it for free if you finish first, and you can buy it for the currency as long as you didn’t finish the last. Returning to the hub world you can spend the currency to unlock more tracks. Or swap your parts/spells. The hub itself sucks. It all looks the same, the tracks entrances have no distinct markers. And then when you unlock the boss-fights you lose even those mostly similar-looking landmarks.
This game is basically Fall Guys–QWOP–Goat Simulator RNG no agency simulator carting with shamelessly cheating bots.
And the difficulty sucks. Checkpoints can not trigger even if you go through them. The bots are rubber-banded, and then they are not simulated out of sight but just moved on the map. As long as you see them, the bots are always dying, often get stuck in a wall and can’t get out. The second you don’t look they are teleported to the finish line and are already lapping you the second time. The more races you finish the harder they get for the entire game. Even if you return to the starting tracks the bots are plain harder better faster stronger than you. You need cash to unlock more races and you need cash to buy your way out of the races, so you have to farm and farm, and even if you’ve found your best case scenario combination of a level, parts/spells and a working tactic, you still will be mostly finishing fourth out of five, getting the minimal amount of cash.
And then there are the boss fights. You can unlock them pretty early, but they all have one specific strategy in mind, and you are never warned. The first boss you get is the frog, somewhere during the mid-game phase. But to play against it properly, you need a part/spell, that drops from another boss. The frog race just sits there taunting you. To start racing the bosses you first have to clear every single race in the game, and use the spells you just get in a chain of whale-frog-spider-dragon-golem. But then each boss-fight is really hard and tight, including the straight-line race against the whale. The game never tells you, but you get a small boost if you press the gas pedal in the right time. Then you have to just keep ahead and get lucky to never smash into anything. You have to finish perfectly and there’s barely enough mana between the checkpoints to keep your spell powered. In the second fight against the frog you just have to train for an hour or two until you win. Now the spider fight is the hardest in the whole game. The track is a very thin ridge and you can fall off it any second. You will never win if you make even one mistake, but you can easily lose if you complete the track perfectly. Because the spider has randomized set of paths it takes. On the fork part of the track it can execute the turns perfectly at extreme speed, or crawl on the walls and lose a lot of time. If you get extremely lucky it can repeat the losing crawl five times in a row. Or it can chose to blast past the fork in the road all five times. You just have to repeat this race for hours until you just win. The next fight against the dragon is made to be basically impossible. The track is pretty hard, the dragon is possible to beat only if you execute everything perfectly. But then, all the mana pick-ups are below your flight altitude. So to win you have to fly perfectly on track, but to fly at all you have to drop off track so you can get the mana pick ups at lower altitude with inertia. You can win this fight if you spend an ungodly amount of time and if you perfect this race. But in fact, the fight against the dragon is a troll race. Damn i hate Ready Player One so much. You win against the dragon by racing backwards. Just fly a little bit properly, to get enough mana, then turn back and move towards the next checkpoint. And then you see that all the checkpoints in this race are arranged in almost a straight line. You just turn left and fly diagonally forward and to the right in a line going through all the checkpoints in order. The last fight is easy you just have to memorize the track and spam the teleport spell at the right time. You get the stupid last cutscene and that’s all.
The game has its unusual look, even if it’s a joke for a joke sake, like the titty stripper kettlebell. The music written by Ruber can’t compete with Vangers OST, but if you can accept it sounding cartoony, it’s actually pretty decent.
I’ve played the fresh Steam re-release of the game. I don’t know which changes were made in this version, if any. They sure did rename it from Moonshine Runners to Spanking Runners, tho. The link to the manual doesn’t work, so you can’t blame me for not knowing some of the mechanics. The games sometimes crashes, and sometimes it freezes.
The turn-based mode doesn’t really work, and that’s the game’s USP. So. Do you want to play a crappy carting game, which is nothing like any other carting game, but at the same time is exactly like every other carting game?
