Bug Mania Demo

The Volkswagen Beetle is probably one of the most iconic cars ever released, given the fact that millions of models were sold and there are still new ones being made today, albeit much more modern-looking. Their small size and interesting looks is what made them popular, however, since they weren't that powerful and they certainly weren't build to take part in racing competitions.

Bug Mania may not directly use the Beetle name or the Volkswagen logo, but the car featured in the game is definitely the one and the same. Thus, contrarily to what you would expect from such a small machine, you need to push them as much as you can, in order to compete in a variety of competitions across many different locations around the world and unlock more tracks and color schemes for the car.

Speaking of tracks, there are over thirty of them, although some are not very different from the others, given the fact that they take place in the same kind of environment, only they follow a different route. You do not really have time to admire the landscape, since the game is very busy trying to annoy you with every opportunity it gets and make the race as miserable as possible.

Beside the sizable collection of bugs that ruin the experience every once in a while, such as clipping textures, over-sized objects and the fact that sometimes your laps are not counted, for some reason, you also have to deal with a very poor control scheme to boot. Hence, the cars are incredibly difficult to steer at low speeds, but they become very malleable and easy-to-handle at top speed, which does not exactly make sense.

Visually, things are equally worse, except for the cars themselves, which manage to look almost believable from time to time. The landscapes, on the other hand, lack any kind of detail and the vegetation is incredibly poor, not to mention the serious lack of distant objects decorating the surrounding environment. There are a few shacks and posts scattered around the tracks, but they are incredibly rare and definitely not worth the effort.

Bug Mania is not the type of game you keep on playing for longer than five minutes, mostly because it shows you everything it can do in those five minutes anyway. The bugs and the annoyances are severely undermining the fun factor as well, not to mention the sketchy control scheme.