A new racing sub-genre has been born: ONRUSH brings the best from the Motorstorm series and combines it with some Overwatch on the side for something that is awesome. Find out why in our ONRUSH review!
ONRUSH Standard Digital Edition is a new breed of high-impact, adrenaline fuelled off-road arcade racing! It’s about speed, takedowns and teamwork with high-tempo thrills that focus on the fun, the excitement and the spectacular. Download now and GET READY FOR THE RUSH.
ONRUSH is brought to you by the developers of the Motorstorm and Driveclub studios, former developers Evolution, now under the Codemasters umbrella. It’s a great fit as they made great racing games back then and Codemasters makes great racing titles right now.
www.codemasters.com/
I guess the first thing to discuss is that this is not a traditional racing game: it’s a team-based objective game. There are no finish lines, so you have to complete objectives in the match. To put it bluntly, this is Overwatch meets racing. And just like Overwatch, this game is being developed as a that will get continuous updates as the overall experience continues to evolve. I would recommend jumping into single player mode first as it slowly introduces the four different game modes and the eight different vehicle classes. The four different gameplay modes are Lockdown, countdown, switch, and Overdrive.
In Lockdown you’re racing to capture a moving circle. You need to move your team’s cars into the circle and hold it for 5 seconds. If the other team comes into the circle with more vehicles or wrecks your vehicles, they take over the point. You can fight over one point for a bit, and the first to reach eight wins. It’s really fun and stressful as you try to help your team secure the wins.
In Countdown, both teams start with 40 seconds, and as your team members ride through green gates, it adds a second to your timer. It’s continually counting down and the first team to hit zero loses. You and your team have to focus on accuracy to hit the gates while knocking out the other team and making them miss the gates. It’s really stressful in a good way, especially as you get closer to the end and you’re within one or two seconds of winning it all or losing big time.
Overdrive is a score based mode on doing damage to the other team and pulling off tricks. First to 10000 points wins. The goal here is destruction and is probably the most basic mode, but still a ton of fun. Nothing like going off a jump and crushing an opponent or checking them off the road or other walls.
The other mode is Switch which is more complicated but really fun. You get three lives with your vehicles. Everyone starts off with bikes(Blade or Outlaw) with there first life. If you crash, you move to your next size of the vehicle(Vortex or Charger). Once again if you crash you move on to your next class of size(Interceptor or Dynamo) and if you crash again you are out of lives, however, you still support your team as the (Titan or Enforcer) trying to crash the other teams. This mode usually involves your team trying to take down the person with the last life or two, while the other team protects that person. Really interesting game mode.
All the modes are great, but what I’m really excited to see is teams in sync with each other developing emerging gameplay techniques in each of the modes. One of my ideas in the Switch mode was to purposely lose all of your lives to get to Titan or the Enforcer and destroy the enemies on their weak bikes comparatively. There is so much that could happen I am interested. As months go by I am excited to see what players are doing in the game.
As mentioned earlier there are 8 classes of Vehicles and they all have different abilities. This is where it’s similar to Overwatch as well. You need to play with all of them to see what works well, for me I found myself using the Outlaw Bike that had a Slam ability that when I did a jump would make enemies vulnerable around me, I could earn more Rush from performing tricks and my Rush(Ultimate) let me drain boost from enemies in range of me. On the opposite end, I really liked the Titan. It would give my team extra shield when I was around them, gained Rush from wrecking enemies(this thing is a bruiser) and when it rushed forward it would leave barriers that the when the other team would hit would slow them down making them easier to take out. The game in the single-player mode gives you the chance to play as all the classes so start there and find what you like.
As the game is a “live” game it will be ever changing. I asked the developers what they are expecting change wise in the future, however, they couldn’t release a roadmap at the moment. Currently, they want to make the base as solid as possible and take player feedback into account in the main modes. Hopefully down the line, we see a roadmap for content.
As it’s a “live” service game as well, it also borrows Loot Crates, although her they are Gear crates. You get them for leveling up and at the current point, there is no way to purchase them separately. They will unlock different vehicles skins, costumes, dance celebrations on the victory screen, tombstones(icons appear where you crashed that other people can pick up) and tricks. I opened over 20 Gear Crates as I played and got a ton of different items in different rarities. I did get some duplicates that are converted to currency, allowing you to purchase what you would like.
As the game is multiplayer-focused I had a chance over the weekend to play during certain times with other reviewers to test the online, as the floodgates hadn’t opened yet with a player base. I had one disconnection, but overall it was a great experience, but for the purposes of the review I wanted to test the servers once actual players got on board. I am glad to report with a ton of hours with the regular servers I had no issues with the game at all. Good connection while playing, not getting booted off and no issues making matches. Good things to see in a “live” game.
The game looks gorgeous. I’m playing on the pro and gives the option for Resolution or Framerate modes like most other games at this point. I tried both ended up personally keeping the Resolution mode, as it looked so nice in 4k. All of the vehicles looked fantastic as you are destroying them on the road. The courses are a bunch of courses that loop repeatedly so you can learn the best path through them depending on what vehicle you are using. The only issue I had there was a course with snow and the snow effect essentially blinded the screen and you couldn’t see what was ahead of you. It looked like the Millennium Falcon was about to jump to Hyperspace. Hopefully, they can correct that in the future. The music was great in the game using fun energetic tracks to get you amped up.
Final Thoughts
Obviously there I’ve made a ton of comparisons to Overwatch as this game obviously took inspiration from there. I wanted to talk about another game that I feel it has comparisons to and that’s Rocket League. When I played Rocket League in Beta the first time I knew there was something special there, and I got similar feelings playing ONRUSH. It’s new and different from your traditional car game in a really unique way. It has some growing to do in terms of what it’s future looks like and how to keep a player base engaged, but it’s following a good model for that. Hopefully we get a road map of what future updates look like going forward. Check this game out as I think we could be talking about it for a few years.
Disclaimer
This ONRUSH review is based on a PlayStation 4 copy provided by Deep Silver.
