Next Car Game's vehicular destruction in 11 GIFs

Things we're bad at: driving cars in Next Car Game , staying on the track for more than five seconds. Things we're great at: Flipping, barrel rolling, and straight-up wrecking cars in Next Car Game. Is it a skill, or an astonishing lack of skill? Either way, it turns out annihilating automobiles in Next Car Game, which is currently on Steam Early Access, is more fun than racing them. The cars crunch and shred and break into so many wonderful pieces, we had to record their destruction in animated GIF form.

Thanks to the physics processing prowess of the Large Pixel Collider , we could record at 1080p and 60fps while barrels and tires and bumpers bounced across the screen. We've compiled our 11 favorite crashes below, but don't worry about them taking forever to load. They're embedded in HTML5 video form, which can compress a chunky 14MB GIF into a digestible two megs. Give 'em a click for a larger version and a link to the original GIF.

The version of Next Car Game currently available on Early Access includes a few trial modes--dirt and tarmac race courses and a free-for-all destruction derby--along with two cars to drive and crash. We tried those out in the Early Access Report last week .

The real treasure, though, is the bonus Bugbear Entertainment tosses in with a purchase: the Sneak Peek 2.0 tech demo. The tech demo sets you loose in a vast, austere playing field filled with car mashers, huge jumps, springs, car cannons, loops, carsketball goals, and a carpachinko course.

And there are about a million barrels, columns, and other physics objects to drive into. We did our best to drive into them all.

Warming up with some simple collisions

I believe I can fly

Why doesn't every car game have a car cannon?

Totally stuck the landing

Wes Fenlon
Senior Editor

Wes has been covering games and hardware for more than 10 years, first at tech sites like The Wirecutter and Tested before joining the PC Gamer team in 2014. Wes plays a little bit of everything, but he'll always jump at the chance to cover emulation and Japanese games.

When he's not obsessively optimizing and re-optimizing a tangle of conveyor belts in Satisfactory (it's really becoming a problem), he's probably playing a 20-year-old Final Fantasy or some opaque ASCII roguelike. With a focus on writing and editing features, he seeks out personal stories and in-depth histories from the corners of PC gaming and its niche communities. 50% pizza by volume (deep dish, to be specific).

Latest in Racing
Victory screen of Big Rigs showing infamous "You're Winner" message under a three-handle gold trophy
One of the worst games ever made is coming to Steam, but we won't know how cruel this joke is until we see the price tag
Screenshot from Wreckfest 2
Wreckfest 2 has hit early access for your car-obliterating combat racing enjoyment
Lonely Mountains: Snow Riders
Lonely Mountains: Snow Riders is getting a new mountain next month and a whole bunch more throughout the year, including a game editor
A 1950s pickup truck smashes through a building while being cornered by a police car in Deliver At All Costs
Chaotic courier sim Deliver At All Costs will crash through your letterbox this May, and its latest trailer is even weirder than I expected
Sonic Racing CrossWorlds, showing various racing competitors hurtling through the air
Sonic Racing CrossWorlds looks like a return to the over-the-top arcade fun of All-Star Racing Transformed, and we'll get to play it this month
A masked sniper pointing his rifle in Nightmare Kart
Superb Bloodborne-inspired racing game Nightmare Kart is getting free DLC featuring sniper rifles and supercharged penny farthings
Latest in News
A True Kin knight stands in a ruin in Caves of Qud, flanked by bloodstained furniture and a freshly mortalized corpse.
Despite making a roguelike where you can have countless arms and legs, Caves of Qud's creators say the ideal form is a limbless sphere: 'We started in perfection and only moved farther from God'
Civilization 7 Great Britain - Modern Civ art (via YouTube)
As Civilization 7 struggles to keep up with Civ 5 player counts, a new patch is coming tomorrow with still more UI changes and gameplay tweaks
Metaphor: ReFantazio character art
Metaphor: ReFantazio battle director says turn-based RPGs can still be just as popular as action RPGs: 'I personally believe turn-based games have a long future ahead of them'
assassin's creed shadows review
Assassin's Creed Shadows streamer goes viral after confronting whining commenters: 'Normal people don't get upset about this sh***'
Assassin's Creed Shadows change seasons - An upper-body shot of Yasuke looking cheerfully up into the distance.
'This is just the beginning': Assassin's Creed Shadows dev team thanks fans for their support and promises more to come in the future
Geralt sitting on a wall wearing a Cyberpunk jacket modded by TheRealArdCarraigh
The Witcher 3 devs had to practically remake the game engine to make official modding possible