OnRush is an upcoming arcade racing game brought to you by Codemasters. You may know of them, as they have some big games under their belt like Formula 1, Grid and Dirt… So you could say that they have some experience with racing games. Their next racing game is an off-road racer that, from the trailer we saw at E3 in 2015, looks like it could be a lot of fun. Could this be the game that I wished Dirt4 was?
I would like to state that at this point, I have only played the Tutorial of the game and everything following are just my honest first impressions of the game. On the surface, OnRush looks just like any other racing game. Right trigger to go, Left to stop, left stick to turn and X to boost; easy enough… But quickly after the basics of driving, the tutorial takes a very interesting turn. The game spawns some vehicles, and tells you to crash into them, on purpose; interesting… These vehicles are sacrifice cars, they take one hit to take out and as a reward, you get some boost.
After driving around going on a destructive rampage, the tutorial moves on to introduce your team. The game mode featured in the tutorial says that working as a team is really important, they are there for you to protect and to protect you. These can either be AI or they can be your friends playing with you online. This is where the game gets interesting, there’s an enemy team as well. The aim is to crash into the other team to take them all out of the game in a fiery blaze. Forget everything you know about racing games, there is no finish line! The game ends when either your team or the enemy team are left standing. A good comparison would be against CounterStrike: Global Offensive. It’s a very similar game mode where various rounds are fought in quick succession without breaking the flow of gameplay.
One of the most important things about a racing game is how the handling feels; I’ve played the tutorial a couple of times now (Purely as a quick five minutes here and there), and I have mixed feelings about it. While driving normally and just steering around a corner, it feels really heavy, almost like I have to push the truck through treacle to get it to turn, but as soon as the back slides out into a drift, it’s wonderfully soft, smooth and flowing. The tutorial only offers one vehicle to drive so I suspect that when I get deeper into the beta things may change.
So far the experience has been very promising; the beta looks like it has a large amount of content based on the 11GB install, so there should be plenty to look at and I can’t wait to explore this game some more! Keep an eye out for my full review that will be out soon. Just a heads up as well that the full game is out on the 5th of June. Speedy Boy out.
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