BeamNG.drive is one of those “big niche” games that, if you live on a certain corner of the internet, is a huge deal — but if you don’t, you may never have heard of it at all. It’s a driving sim, known for extremely realistic “soft-body” physics, that launched on Steam 11 years ago and has been in early access the whole time. As of today, it’s also available on PlayStation 5.
Over those 11 years, BeamNG.drive has slowly but steadily built up a sizable audience, to the extent that it’s currently the second-biggest driving game on Steam, ahead of Forza Horizon 6 and behind the mighty Euro Truck Simulator 2. I suspect it’s going to do pretty well on PS5, too. If you’re into car games — and a lot of PlayStation gamers are — you don’t have to spend very long on car-game YouTube before BeamNG.drive is invoked, often in pretty breathless terms. The PS5 version of Forza Horizon 6 just got pushed back to January. And PS5 might be the cheapest way to run this demanding, computationally expensive game at decent fidelity.
Never having dabbled in BeamNG.drive before, I spent a few hours mucking around with the PS5 version. At the outset, the game warns you to expect a different experience to your average racing game, and it’s not wrong. But only some of this is down to its remarkable simulation engine. Much of it is that BeamNG.drive is an unrestricted, unrefined simulation sandbox, and that the developers at BeamNG are clearly still in the process of figuring out how to curate it, and how to design within it.
I gather that it’s a lot more accessible than it used to be. There is now an “onboarding” tutorial, which shows you how to use the byzantine interface to spawn new vehicles and set them on fire as well as drive them. There are recommended Quick-Start experiences. And there’s a Career, too, which is a slightly more curated version of the game’s Freeroam mode in which you buy your car, earn money, and take out insurance to pay for your repairs.
Repairing your car is something you will need to do often, because BeamNG.drive‘s principal selling point is its astounding crash dynamics. Soft-body physics means that every component of the car, down to individual suspension and engine parts, is simulated individually to derive its realistic behaviour, rather than being a manually-coded simulacrum that can ignore anything that’s inconvenient to the game designer. (Or to the car company that licensed the car; BeamNG.drive only has fictional vehicles.) If you smash your car into a tree at speed in BeamNG.drive, it won’t go anymore — because the suspension’s broken, or a wheel is missing, or the engine’s been cleaved right off the chassis.
The realism of BeamNG.drive‘s damage system is truly astonishing and entertaining in its own right. In Freeroam, you can simply rewind your way out of a crash. In Career, you need to pay to fix it. And in most of the game’s many, many challenge scenarios, you either limp on with your broken vehicle, or restart. It turns out there’s a reason other than licensing that most racing games don’t feature realistic damage — it often brings your fun to a brutal end.
Aside from the damage modeling, BeamNG.drive‘s soft-body physics also ensure that vehicles handle with amazing realism, even if it doesn’t always feel that way. I was initially surprised by what felt like rather jerky, non-progressive steering and a bouncy in-car camera that doesn’t successfully communicate what’s going on with the car (or, perhaps, communicates too much). It’s more fun to watch the car in chase cam, anyway, and marvel at the way its suspension rides over bumps, or its tyres suddenly give away their grip.
It might not have the most refined feel, but there’s no doubting the incredible capability of BeamNG.drive‘s handling physics. This is probably best highlighted in the game’s brilliant rally mode, which includes a unique Rally Loop gamestyle in which you have to drive through traffic to special stages, stop at time controls, and follow a strict event schedule.
There’s a huge variety of stuff to do, accessible either from a gameplay browser or by exploring the Freeroam maps (which include West Coast, East Coast, and Utah, USA maps as well as Italy). There’s drifting, racing, time trials, bus driving, police chases, rock crawling, trucking deliveries, drag racing, hypermilling fuel-efficiency challenges, precision parking, and missions where you fire cannons at cars to wreck them.
Some of this is great fun, and there are things the physics engine is particularly well suited to, like chucking hatchbacks round a rallycross oval, or racing bangers on dusty outback trails. But you have to be prepared to dip around to find your own fun and an appropriate difficulty level. The event design can be rudimentary, and there’s no curation, organization, or progression to any of it — outside of the Career, which is clearly in the early stages of balancing and development still.
BeamNG is a team of gifted engineers that has built something extraordinary. As game designers, though, they are a work in progress — just like the game itself, which feels as though it may never reach 1.0. If you love to tinker and tool around, and don’t mind a complex, laggy interface and a lack of structure, you’ll have a great time. For me, it’s just too disorganized, too abrupt.
Realistic simulators don’t have to be devoid of design sensibility and internal coherence. I’ve been playing a lot of American Truck Simulator recently; there is a game that understands precisely the kind of experience it’s selling and how to bring the player into it. My worry for BeamNG is that this isn’t the kind of vision you can discover 11 years into development. But I’d love to be proven wrong.