Rusty Driver

Although it doesn’t seem like it at a glance, the standards are pretty high for modern video games, even the casual ones. Older games used to be a lot uglier and riddled with bugs back in the day, even those developed by respectable studios. Thanks to streamlined engines like Unity and Unreal Engine, on the other hand, it’s much easier to avoid problems and provide people with gorgeous games.

Rusty Driver is not the kind of game that comes close to these higher standards, on the other hand, given the fact that it looks a decade out of place. However, the underlying concept is pretty tantalizing, at least if the developers manage to put all of their ideas into practice. Until then, it’s probably more fun to read the upcoming feature list than it is to play the game.

Even if the main activity is driving your car, the main character also has his own house, which has a TV, a bed and not much else right now. The car itself looks like it would only start if you manually turn the pistons somehow, but then again it runs without problems once you get in. As for the map, you are free to roam as you please, although there is not much to see or do.

The concepts of open world and free roam don’t make too much sense if the map is very small, as it happens to be the case here. There’s a very short dirt road with a few ramps, as well as the grass around it, but nothing else to explore. When even a short real-world race track is larger than the whole in-game map, maybe open world is not the proper term to use.

As for the graphics, it’s difficult to say anything nice about them, but then again they shouldn’t matter as much in the case of an indie production. In Rusty Driver, however, even the forest is a static picture plastered on walls, so the bar is quite low. You can even switch between multiple cameras, including a cockpit view, but things don’t get any better once you are inside the car either.

All things considered, Rusty Driver is not yet what it advertises itself to be, and it’s going to be a while until the developers can deliver on their promises. Meanwhile, there are far better alternatives out there.