There are many racing games out there. Like Forza Horizon, Forza Motorsport, Need for Speed, and Gran Turismo. But one that stands out is Beamng. Drive. Beamng. Drive or Just Beamng is a soft-body physics car simulation game. The NG part of the title stands for Next Generation. The game was released on May 29th, 2015. The game is available for purchase on Steam for 29 dollars Canadian not including tax. Thomas Fischer founded Beamng. The game has an overwhelmingly positive review on Steam. AKA a 10 out of 10/10. But is it really that good? In this text, I will be reviewing beamng and rating each category of the game such as gameplay, content and graphics
A little bit of History:
Beamng has a pretty long history as a racing game when Rigs of Rods was released. Rigs of Rods was a game that was one of a kind. The game was made by the same developers of Beamng. Back then the physics and the destruction in Rigs of Rods were ahead of their time. In fact, I also got to try this game! But the game was terrible. This game has many problems. Such as bad maps, low-quality vehicles and the guy. This made sense because their game only took a couple of years to develop. 6 years later the team decided to recreate the game from scratch, this is why they added NG to the name which I guess stands for the next generation of Rigs of Rods. They used Torque 3d to develop the game. On May 8th, 2012 they created a website as well. The game was published as a tech demo on 3 August 2013, officially published on 29 May 2015 and was available on Steam. Rigs of Rods can still be downloaded from the official website as a free game. Despite this, the engine is outdated, and more people prefer Beamng. Drive.
Above: the guy that you can play as. Notice how bad the quality of the map is.
Gameplay:
In my opinion, the game gets boring if you don’t know what to do. Because the menu has tons of features and things you can do to modify the game, while this is good it can be confusing to new players which can make players quit the game(rip $30). But the game gets better the more you know what to do. Another thing I did not really enjoy about the game is that there is no multiplayer in Beamng. Drive. You can download mods to play the game in multiplayer. Like Beam. Mp But the drawback is that the game will be really laggy when too many people join. The good things about Beamng. Drive and the only reason 90% of people are attracted to this game is the crashes. Not only does this contributes to the realism of the game but it makes the game way more satisfying and fun. I really enjoyed the ai cars in beamng. There is also a game mode called campaign mode. But I haven’t tried it out yet. A feature that I found really useful was the menu. You can modify your car in the menu, change ai settings, change the gravity and more. With all these features you can basically do anything in Beamng. Drive. This game is perfect for anybody because with all these features you can basically do anything. The game is playable on pc only and is compatible with a Controller or a Steering wheel. You will also need a pc with at least 16 Gigabytes of ram and about 4 Gigabytes of video ram. Which I don’t have. Overall the gameplay is very fun when you become more used to the confusing menu. So 8/10 for the gameplay.
Content:
Beamng has an okay amount of content without mods. The game currently has 29 vehicles and a couple of maps to play in. Keep in mind that these cars are fictional because they do not have any licenses from automobile makers. So if you wanted this game to drive your favourite car such as Toyota, Nissan, Lamborghini, Porsche etc, then you’re out of luck. Unless… Unless you download mods. So basically mods are folders you can download from the internet. The folders contain the necessary files for a map, a vehicle or more. So if you wanted a Nissan Skyline then you gotta download mods. I recommend downloading mods from the official Beamng mod website. Because there are a lot of websites that can give you viruses by downloading the mods from there. Some of these websites are pretty good as well. But I recommend having some antivirus on while downloading mods from other websites. Just in case. I would give the content a 5 out of 10 but since there are thousands of mods on the internet so the content is a 7 out of 10. You might spend a lot of time downloading mods instead of really playing the game.
Graphics:
Okay, there is a reason why I put graphics last. So the graphics are ok knowing that the game was released in 2015. If the graphics were like Forza or Gran Turismo it would lag the game terribly and probably break your pc. You can increase the graphics to the max in the settings if you have a really good computer. Another way to make Beamng more realistic is to add motion blur. The upside about the graphics is that some car model interiors are really realistic. The maps are bearable. Overall 6/10 for the graphics.
Conclusion:
Beamng is a great game with thousands of content and realistic physics for a decent amount of money. Beamng turned from a small open-source game to a popular Steam game with a great review. Like planes? Do you happen to be a JDM fanboy? Do you like off-roading? Are you a serious sim racer? Or do you like breaking things for fun? Then beamng is perfect for you. At least for people with good pcs. Overall the whole game would be an 8.5 / 10.
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