Gaming Roundup | Monster Truck Championship and Cyberpunk 2077 car reveals
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The video game gods have blessed us with a few new releases and an awesome new reveal this week for our gaming roundup. Cyberpunk 2077 has revealed some awesomely futuristic vehicles, Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit came out this week, and we have some hands-on impressions of the brand new Monster Truck Championship game. Let's dive in.
Monster Truck Championship is out this week, and it's super fun
Monster Truck Championship, as you might expect, is a racing game totally focused on the wild world of monster trucks. I played through the first few hours of the game during our twice-weekly gaming livestream and had an absolute blast doing it. It doesn't have the same level of polish that a higher-budget game like Need For Speed or Forza might, but it makes up for that by clearly putting the focus on fun.
From what I saw in the first few hours of the career mode, there are event types like normal track races, "drag" races, and "freestyle." To the game's credit, I found every event type to be really enjoyable. I never really got bored during my time with it. Track races are fun thanks to the insanity of the fact that you're attempting to race several enormous monster trucks around a track, drag races are great because you can easily see how small strategy changes help to shave a few milliseconds off each run, and freestyle, which might have been my favorite, is basically like if you took Tony Hawk Pro Skater mechanics and applied them to a Monster Truck game. It was a blast.
One of the weirdest things about this game was a unique control scheme. If you're a gamer, you probably know the standard driving game controls. Right trigger is go, left trigger is stop, and left thumbstick turns the car. That all still applies here, but the developers threw in an added wrinkle — while the left thumbstick does indeed control the movement of your front wheels, in this game, the right thumbstick controls the movement of your back wheels totally independently. This is a little strange to get used to, but it's a great solution for allowing and encouraging the precision moves needed to pull off some nutty tricks and recoveries.
There are also some customization options for your truck included in the game; a pretty shallow, but fun, team management mode (and to be honest, I prefer them to be a bit more on the shallow side. These games are about racing, not managing!); and a multiplayer mode that I wasn't able to try since we were lucky enough to get our hands on this game a bit before release.
Overall, everything I tried was really fun, and I'll definitely be coming back to this game both on the stream and in my free time. For just $39.99, Monster Truck Championship gets a thumbs up from me. You can pick the game up now for PC on the Steam store, on October 20 for Xbox and PS4, and November 24 for Nintendo Switch.
Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit is ready to take your living room by storm
Another big release this week, but one we haven't been lucky enough to try yet, is Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit! This is a quirky, augmented-reality version of Mario Kart, where you race real RC cars controlled by your Nintendo Switch around your actual house, and you can watch all of the action on-screen thanks to the little karts' built-in cameras. We'll have more to come on this game soon, but for now, if you're interested, you can learn more and pick up a copy right here.
Cyberpunk 2077 has revealed all kinds of awesome in-game vehicles
Cyberpunk 2077 is a retro-futuristic, open-world game created by the team that made Witcher 3, one of the most beloved western RPGs of all time. The game features a gigantic open-world map, mind-blowingly gorgeous graphics, and stars everyone's favorite human, Keanu Reeves. It's finally releasing next month on November 19, and while this game isn't necessarily car-based, as with nearly all open-world games, you'll need to spend a fair amount of time behind the wheel of an in-game vehicle to traverse the game's huge world.
In the lead-up to the November release, the developers have dropped all kinds of info about the game's vehicles, and so far, they all look pretty awesome. While most of the cars in the game are made-up futuristic interpretations of current vehicles, both Porsche and Keanu Reeves' motorcycle company Arch stand alone in being the only two actual brands to have vehicles featured in-game. We've attached a trailer showing some of the cars below, but be warned, there's an excitable character who drops some profanity early on in the video, in case any little ones are nearby.
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