One minute you’re flicking through Steam’s Next Fest demos, and finding one that looks to be included despite having come out in May. The next, you’re desperately firing missiles into the rear end of giant monster truck, a sole red light glaring out from its metallic behind, as though it’s mega-pissed that it seems to have gotten stuck in a cluster of trees. Given that, it should be easy prey for the ordnance strapped to the bonnet of my very Mad Max-ish muscle car coated in enough sheets of metal to fence off several allotments.
This is Mad Metal, though, an indie game whose murderous enemy cars have minds of their own and move more like automotive animals than simple machines.
The car combat was the thing that drew me to try the demo of solo developer Hakim Elayday’s work-in-progress metal twister, which fittingly looks to have grown from its creator’s sadness at last year’s reports Sony had canceled an unannounced live-service Twisted Metal game.
I’m a simple man, I see the opportunity to slam the pedal to the metal and fire a machine gun while doing some skids, and I take it. As you can imagine, then I was in my element when pretty much right out of the gate, Mad Metal tasked me with chasing down and stopping a train covered in rusty spikes.
Yelling the line from GTA San Andreas as I went, I splattered the engine pulling it with lead until it looked like a chrome colander, and was rewarded with some new car parts. This is the general loop of Mad Metal from what I’ve played of it so far. You drive around an Unreal Engine map that’s mostly hills littered with light shrubbery and patches of woodland, running into groups of two or three hostile vehicles from various gangs at a time.
Watch on YouTube
Then, the great driving dance of death begins. You and your foes that in some instances seem to lurch around more like hostile creatures than cars orbit each other, firing your ordnance and occasionally smashing together, until one of you explodes. It’s an absolute blast most of the time, with the loveable jankiness with which it all happens just adding to the blast you can have with it.
There was one point when I was fighting two “Monster Driller ATVs” – bright yellow armoured 4x4s with three spinning drill bits menacingly protruding from their bumpers – and ended up wearing one as a hat. Its raised suspension meant that my slam into it had wedged me underneath, so I merrily drove around for a bit with my camera clipped into the invisible void of a nonexistent interior, watching as its circular teeth continued to spin away despite their host being out for the count.
There’s a slow time button, which really helps you appreciate fun little touches like the game’s bushes hastily flattening like frightened possums in response to you launching a flurry of bullets at a camper van. There’s also a giant metal eye right out of something like 2001: A Space Odyssey or Portal hovering over you the whole time, providing guidance and dropping memey computer sass like “he needs some milk” when you get exploded.
Overall, at this point Mad Metal’s a bit of a car crash, in both good ways and bad. The core of it’s pretty fun, even if getting a kick out of the more ridiculous jank has definitely played a role in that for me. It’s not got a release date right now, but the demo’s definitely something.
