Smash Up Derby Demo

Racing competitions revolve around fast cars and professional drivers, who do everything in their power to go as fast as they can and avoid hitting any obstacles in the process. While this is certainly exciting in itself and highly admirable, a bit of destruction always gets the spirits going, which is exactly why demolition derbies were invented in the first place.

Smash Up Derby is a car game in which speed and handling is only important for the first couple of yards, after which all that matters is crashing into the other opponents and ruining their ride in the process. Naturally, you also have to watch out for them doing the same thing to you, since the entire purpose of the competition is for only one man to get out of the arena.

The game at hand does not concern itself with too much originality or a variety of modes to try out, which might be a bit of a disappointment, especially if you quickly get bored of doing the same thing. However, demolition derbies are rarely boring and you can try them out in multiplayer as well, where players from all over the world can gather and smash cars together.

Right from the bat, you can observe that realism was not really emphasized during development, which means that the vehicles do not react very accurately to your controls, nor respect the laws of physics most of the time. Despite that, it is quite simple to learn how to handle the cars and keep them on the desired trajectory, especially since the entire purpose of the matches is not to avoid anything.

Visually, the game uses a rather outdated graphics engine, but it looks good enough not to be distracting. The vehicles are nicely modeled and most of their bits and pieces bend or fall off during the matches, which does wonder for the atmosphere and really makes the entire experience a bit more fun, since you can see the cars slowly getting in worse and worse condition as the matches get lengthier.

In the end, Smash Up Derby may not innovate the genre in any way, nor come up with new ideas regarding the demolition derby mechanics as a whole. Despite that, you can certainly still have quite a bit of fun with it, especially with your friends in the multiplayer mode.