A futuristic rally game where you drive an acrobatic jet powered car through winding tracks and try not to explode.
There are two ways I can describe this game. Firstly is that it that this is a driving survival game, but not in the same sense as Pacific Drive where you have to maintain the car and find resources, but more in the sense that you’re trying to reach your goal whilst the world is comspiring to kill you. And secondly, if WipeOut is the future equivalent of F1, then Distance is the future equivalent of Rally racing.
The game starts with a campaign mode that teaches you the controls, gives you space to practice your maneuvers, and tutorialises the car’s 4 main movement abilities. If you dig into the lore and aesthetics of the main campaign, under the hood is a horror story about an alien infection trying to reach earth, and you trying to beat it there. If you’re familliar with racing games you’ll probably spend an hour or two here. Afterwards though, the true meat of the game comes in the form of Arcade mode.
Arcade mode consists of the game’s freeplay elements, and comes in four flavours. Sprint is the basic time trials. Play through a hundred or so official maps, and countless user created workshop maps, and race to reach those gold medal times. Some of them can be really tricky, and require learning some tech like gripfly and cooldown rolling, but as you improve at the game you start to identify safe places to use techniques like these and save time. Some tracks even include risky routes and dev-intended shortcuts which you have to find and take in order to get the gold time, but only if the shortcut is an obvious part of the track, like a side route or jumping over a loop instead of taking it normally.
Challenge mode is like Sprint, where you have to race for a fast time, but the key difference is that there are no checkpoints and no respawning. If you hit something, or fall out of bounds, or overheat, you DNF and have to restart. Honestly I play Sprint mode like this anyway so it’s not too hard to get used to. Stunt mode instead of giving you a normal track gives you a stadium and a time limit, and your goal is to score as many points as possible by stunting around, wall/ceiling riding, doing tricks, and building multiplier. And lastly, Trackmogrify is the game’s automatic level generator, which lets you specify a seed (including some special keywords you can discover or look up) and race as many tracks as you want.
Lets talk movement tech. It’d be a pretty boring game if you were just driving around in your mums Honda after all.
Hold A or RB to boost: This increases the heat guage on the back of your car, and after about 10 seconds holding it, you overheat and explode. You can cool off the car though by passing through gates and checkpoints, or doing tricks. You want to hold boost. More or less every single track in the game, in order to get the best time (that doesn’t involve flying out of bounds and stunting off scenery) you need to boost the whole time. Letting go for even a tiny bit could lose you a couple seconds to the ghosts. If you’re gonna overheat, then its time to start doing barrel rolls. Jump and do a quick spin in order to cool down the car a little bit between checkpoints so that you can keep boosting.
Tap X to jump: Thats right, this Rally game is a platformer. You’re gonna get hit with walls, drops, buzz saws, lasers, and various other obstacles that are gonna try and stop you on your path to the goal, and being able to jump over them is one of the tools you have to dodge them. Just be careful about the curvature of the track when you jump. If there is a barrier at the bottom of the hill, don’t jump too early otherwise you’ll find that “up” where you jump is the same direction as straight into the wall.
Tap X in air to fly: It’s a powerful ability, so powerful in fact that a good number of stages will have sections that forbid you from flying. You can use your wings to fly over large gaps, bypass obstacles, take to the skies and stunt off scenery to explore, or just skip through loops and noodly sections to shortcut the tracks. Bare in mind that while your wings are out you experience much more friction and get slowed down, and your boost is held on so you will overheat. Do barrel rolls using LB+LS (or if you’re like me, rebind RS from camera controls to flight controls) and then land to bank the trick cooldown. You can also wallride on buildings in the background to build up trick points, just make sure to land again somewhere to earn the cooldown.
Lastly, Hold LB to grip: Its a set of thrusters on the top of your car. Once you unlock the grip thrusters, you also unlock the ability to roll and pitch your car in air, which enables the aformentioned cooldown rolls. Grip is used to push the car down. It pins you to tracks that curve wildly, allows you to take crests without jumping, and most importantly, it allows you to snap to walls and ceilings. One of the most common obstacles you’ll see is the track falling away and having to jump towards a wall or ceiling by rotating towards it and then gripping to it. You’ll absolutely need to learn this to even just survive the campaign. The grip thrusters also allow you to bypass some flight sections and obstacles without losing speed to wings friction by gripflying, where you turn the car upside down and thrust upwards to hover. It takes a lot to get used to, and you need to pay attention to your pitch controls being inverted while you’re upside down, but once mastered it can save huge amounts of time on some stages.
None of this is talking about the games stunning aesthetic and sound design. The car sounds weighty and fast, the world ranges from neon lit skies to dark space stations, natural canyons to artificial platforms floating in a void. Every stage has a distinct style both in presentation and track design. The soundtrack is full of heavy pumping electro music to really put you in the zone for driving a jet powered supercar around at 180 MPH barrelling through the sky like nothing can stop you, but if it’s not to your taste, you can load in custom music to play as well. The music and design of the game is incredibly good at putting you into a flow state to focus up and drive fast, and almost every mistake feels fair. While there were a few tracks that frustrated me, I still ultimately enjoyed the grind to complete them and set medal times.
The game does have multiplayer. I haven’t tried it yet, but at the very least, in local split screen races, there is car contact, which I’m sure would make for some very fun racing >:)
Multiplayer introduces one extra mode that Arcade doesn’t have, which is Reverse Tag, where you play in one of the stunt maps, and whoever is tagged collects time, winning when they accumulate 3 minutes.
Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/233610 £19.49
Humble Bundle: https://www.humblebundle.com/store/distance £19.49
Leave a Reply