I’d watched the trailers for Onrush, Codemasters new multiplayer adrenaline fuelled racer, so I really thought I knew what to expect from the game. I was gloriously wrong.
The Beta for Onrush, which launched on PS4 a few days ago, showcases the complete madness that is a single ‘race’ in the game. Only you aren’t really racing, not in the traditional sense. The idea isn’t to get to an arbitrary finishing line and claim some gold cup for your efforts. No. You’re just shoved on to a track and told to go very very fast, preferably while colliding with other cars along the way.
You’re not alone, either. Every race pits you with a team of online players and another rival team. There are also NPC cars and bikes for you to utterly destroy just to get a little more boost. The idea is to crash the rivals cars and those AI cars to earn boost, which then goes on to give you Rush, a sort of mad hyper boost. You earn points for the team by boosting and rushing and these go towards the overall score, which allows you to win the game after a set time.
It sort of sounds rather mundane on paper but Onrush is so fast and frantic and utterly mad that it’s often hard to get your head around just what you’re doing. It feels a little like Motorstorm and the Crash mode from the Burnout franchise had a baby then strapped it in to a very fast car and turned the nitro on.
So, it’s not a racing game but it’s a game about racing, racing to get the most boost you can before the rival team racks up more points than you. More importantly. it’s a completely fresh concept that really does work, though it remains to be seen how sustainable it is unless other modes mix things up considerably.
The Onrush beta is currently live on Xbox One and PS4 with the full game launching 5th June 2018.
