Console Corner: Onrush review

Turn Onrush and you won't turn off.

Thursday, 21st June 2018, 4:36 pm
Updated Tuesday, 26th June 2018, 11:24 am
Onrush is a racing game in the loosest sense of the word.. and thats no bad thing

Imagine you’re in a video game lab trying to make an original racing game and you splice together Motorstorm and Overwatch... Onrush is what would come out the other side.

Onrush is a vehicular combat game developed by Codemasters and published by Deep Silver for PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Windows.

You take control of cars, motorcycles and off-road vehicles across huge levels over hilly terrains with nitro-style boosts to boot.

You earn said boost juice by performing stunts and slamming rival combatants to take them out.

But this is no racing game. Yes there are winners and losers but there’s not a finishing line in sight. And I love it.

For example in Overdrive, teams score points by boosting; the first team to boost enough to reach the target score wins.

Countdown involves a series of checkpoints and a timer that drains but teams can keep it from running out by successfully passing the checkpoints, and if one team’s timer runs out, the other team scores a point.

Lockdown is a King of the Hill-style mode in which teams fight to stay inside a zone that moves along the track with them for points.

Switch gives each member of the team three lives and tasks the teams with taking each other down to win, but upon crashing, a player will respawn in a more powerful vehicle if they have lives left.

I seem to have a bad habit of comparing video games to previous titles at the moment and Onrush really doesn’t compare to anything I’ve played before but it is like the Royal Rumble of racing game or a Super Smash Bros melee mix.

Literally buzzing with originality, online car-brawls are the new pick up and play addiction to bide the time between the next big first person shooter multiplayer release. This innovative approach screams of the kind of unique IPs that made Codemasters such a force in video game history.

The all-important gameplay is on point while superb graphics and a wide variety of vast tracks add icing to a delicious cake.

There are some issues with takedowns and there are reports that glitches are seeing teams awarded points they haven’t earned in some game modes - although for the record I am yet to experience or at least notice that myself.

But it takes little away from what is one of the best, most unique, original, fun, addictive and downright brilliant games I have played in a long time. Simply wicked.