What is a racing game? It's a genre where players wield vehicles like maniacal wildebeests, where overtaking drivers, giving them a polite shove off the race track and asserting dominance by claiming victories and championships by simultaneously following the rules and leaving the competition choking on exhaust fumes, asphalt and kitty litter is the name of the game. ONRUSH, with its exclamatory capital lettering, has decided that the rulebook be cast into the trash can and burned to ash because the conventional means of circuit-racing and tussling for position is now passé, and ONRUSH applies a total reskin of what we've come to know a racing game to be for the sake of maintaining freshness and levity to keep the genre ticking. “And so here we are with a racing game that has no racing in it” say the sceptics, but if you believe the latter you're sorely missing the point-ONRUSH is here to rig satchel charges and obliterate what you think a racing game is, ripping up its sacred sacrosanct formula in the process- so buckle up and don't lose your keister- it's very exciting.
Blending inspirations together to form a rapturous cocktail of flying debris, ONRUSH takes very little time to make an impact in your face and ear canals. Sporting the bright colours and online quiver of Overwatch, the crashing of Burnout, the style and visual flare of Rocket League and the chaos of Motorstorm-ONRUSH does all it can to stand out like a disruptive ten-year old in Sunday school listening to unrelenting dubstep whilst twerking, doing the floss dance and trotting gangnam style around the work desks. The outcome is a cheery and bright explosion of whimsy wrapped around a racing game, it's sorta like putting a multi-coloured slush puppy on top of your cornetto-it might not seem like a cohesive fusion, but it certainly looks stylish.
Blending inspirations together to form a rapturous cocktail of flying debris, ONRUSH takes very little time to make an impact in your face and ear canals. Sporting the bright colours and online quiver of Overwatch, the crashing of Burnout, the style and visual flare of Rocket League and the chaos of Motorstorm-ONRUSH does all it can to stand out like a disruptive ten-year old in Sunday school listening to unrelenting dubstep whilst twerking, doing the floss dance and trotting gangnam style around the work desks. The outcome is a cheery and bright explosion of whimsy wrapped around a racing game, it's sorta like putting a multi-coloured slush puppy on top of your cornetto-it might not seem like a cohesive fusion, but it certainly looks stylish.
The soundtrack, the visual style, the traces of inspiration-all of it is here to make ONRUSH feel like a game-changer, one guided by the gall to bust out of the usual racing game tropes. ONRUSH looks brazen because it is brazen-and is not simply a paint explosion in a factory visited by a stampeding parade of zoo animals wrecking about on bikes and buggies.
The carnage that is strewn throughout ONRUSH can be likened to a pack of hyenas hunting down and gorily devouring antelope, you and your competition the former while spare vehicles called 'fodder' assume the latter. In ONRUSH you aren't tussling for position, there are no finish lines, but you need to put the peddle to the metal, and you need to be ravenous and raging at all times.
While ONRUSH is primarily a multiplayer game at heart due to its strict emphasis on team-play, you can go at it alone courtesy of the challenge-stuffed career dubbed 'Superstar', where you will compete in a series of highly-competitive pulse-jutting modes partnering with your A.I team to satisfy the primary goal of shutting out your opposition, and earning star points to advance to the next battery of contests by satisfying a diverse and increasingly difficult set of challenges. These challenges range from protecting your teammates with a shield, landing quirky tricks and taking out a set amount of opposition and fodder vehicles. It's always healthy to bump up your adrenaline by blasting rivals out of the way, and although there's nothing contextualising the frantic Mad Max style pack racing gimmick, you're always encouraged to get the best out of the mayhem.
The carnage that is strewn throughout ONRUSH can be likened to a pack of hyenas hunting down and gorily devouring antelope, you and your competition the former while spare vehicles called 'fodder' assume the latter. In ONRUSH you aren't tussling for position, there are no finish lines, but you need to put the peddle to the metal, and you need to be ravenous and raging at all times.
While ONRUSH is primarily a multiplayer game at heart due to its strict emphasis on team-play, you can go at it alone courtesy of the challenge-stuffed career dubbed 'Superstar', where you will compete in a series of highly-competitive pulse-jutting modes partnering with your A.I team to satisfy the primary goal of shutting out your opposition, and earning star points to advance to the next battery of contests by satisfying a diverse and increasingly difficult set of challenges. These challenges range from protecting your teammates with a shield, landing quirky tricks and taking out a set amount of opposition and fodder vehicles. It's always healthy to bump up your adrenaline by blasting rivals out of the way, and although there's nothing contextualising the frantic Mad Max style pack racing gimmick, you're always encouraged to get the best out of the mayhem.
ONRUSH is comprised of four modes-Overdrive,Switch,Lockdown and Countdown each mode crucially involving certain levels of teamwork, but interestingly they're fastened to multiplayer trends that scream FPS rather than anything par for the course in the racing game genre.
Overdrive is the most straightforward and enjoyable of the quartet. Get ready to punt the backsides of buggies into successive oblivion, ramp off dunes, inclines and man-made structures, performing tricks and mid-air barrel rolls to top up an ONRUSH meter, that unleashes a furious charge of boosting forward momentum accompanied by the backing of yelling vocals to bolster the relentless charge, capable of carving through any obstacle impeding your path whilst netting you a wealth of points to put towards your team's total. The more boost you use the greater total of points you amass. A breakneck, high-speed thrillride, Overdrive is the quintessential mode of ONRUSH and is a rollicking good time.
Countdown is an appealing mode where you and your opposition are tagged with a timer that gradually dwindles down to zero. Avoiding the timer hitting zero requires you to race through bright luminous green gates which will save you a modicum of time, the first team to reach zero loses and gifts the other team a round. Not a particularly remarkable mode, Countdown nevertheless delivers on multiplayer urgency and is serviceable enough to entertain.
Lockdown assumes a King of the Hill set up, where you and your team must 'lockdown' zones, turning them into your team's colour by having the most drivers of your colour in the zone at one time, then waiting for five full seconds for a successful capture. Teamwork is crucial in this mode and jostling for control of zones is an invigorating and frantic ordeal worth experiencing, successfully capitalising on ONRUSH's team-based aesthetic, creating a fierce and savage tug of war for zone dominance.
The last mode is Switch, which is like a conventional Overdrive mode, but this time each player has three 'Switches'(essentially vehicles swaps) to use up. You'll start out on a bike, and then transfer to an ATV and lastly to a heavier vehicle-starting you out with the unpredictable and speedy dirt bikes, and culminating with a juggernaut vehicle, meaning as the mode gets tougher and you use up your Switches, the vehicles you get to control become more formidable. Once the three Switches have been exhausted you're technically eliminated, though you can still wreak all the havoc you want and try to eliminate the adversarial survivors still desperately clinging onto their switches. Switch is calculated carnage, but should have been a full-on eliminator style mode because the teamwork element of Switch doesn't quite congeal with the central multiplayer conceits ONRUSH proudly boasts and thus feels a tinge out of place.
With these four modes, the Evolution wing of CodeMasters have done a great job of making ONRUSH feel distinctive and memorable, but the necessity for causing destruction is downplayed by a flavourful but familiar teamwork and multiplayer epidermis. Some will no doubt turn their noses up at ONRUSH because decimating the field and leaving the pack trailing in mechanical detritus is no longer the main hook of the excitable action, but offering your time to its deviancy will eventually show you that good times can be had if you throw out your reservations and ulterior motives for the splendour of smacking the folly off course with reckless abandon. 4 multiplayer modes is pretty anaemic too, but the battlegrounds you wage four-wheeled frenzies on do pick up the slack some.
The untamed rockiness of the terrain is what makes the competitive nature of ONRUSH a glorious and exhilarating thrill ride, with many opportunities for sick jumps, gargantuan descents and marvelling at the kinds of surfaces you'll be racing on. Riding on a huge graffiti-sprayed curve and along narrow metal platforms is a familiar sight as you'll be bolting across dams, rail yards, beaches and refineries-an eclectic mix of levels that can unfortunately bog down into familiarity although the weather and time of days somewhat keeps these tracks from becoming stale in the long run, though more terrain to race on would've certainly alleviated these complaints.
At times controller throttling rage at stumbling into environmental obstacles like concrete walls and tree branches that tend to happen with toe stubbing frequency, leaving you reeling in momentary annoyances time and again, making you feel like an inadequate racer. Suffices to say, ONRUSH's levels reflect its arcade sensibilities wonderfully, but too commonly frustrations cause your death-defying momentum to grind to spark-spitting halt by the devious menace of inanimate objects. The velocity as you thread the eye of say two parallel trains at a train yard is undeniably thrilling, but hitting an obstacle at such an outrageous speed is like smashing your upper set of teeth on a dinner plate-it doesn't taste good.
ONRUSH doesn't forget to be fashionable as there are a bevy of options to customise your character and your ride. These features are elevated by the prize caches you receive when you level up and include clothing items, crashtags and dance animations for characters to perform. Kitting out your riders and their vehicles is a neat customising touch and is coherent with the personality ONRUSH exudes, always in your face and always cool and unrepentantly trendy. There's also a photo mode so you can save and treasure your most electrifying and tranquil moments.
Overdrive is the most straightforward and enjoyable of the quartet. Get ready to punt the backsides of buggies into successive oblivion, ramp off dunes, inclines and man-made structures, performing tricks and mid-air barrel rolls to top up an ONRUSH meter, that unleashes a furious charge of boosting forward momentum accompanied by the backing of yelling vocals to bolster the relentless charge, capable of carving through any obstacle impeding your path whilst netting you a wealth of points to put towards your team's total. The more boost you use the greater total of points you amass. A breakneck, high-speed thrillride, Overdrive is the quintessential mode of ONRUSH and is a rollicking good time.
Countdown is an appealing mode where you and your opposition are tagged with a timer that gradually dwindles down to zero. Avoiding the timer hitting zero requires you to race through bright luminous green gates which will save you a modicum of time, the first team to reach zero loses and gifts the other team a round. Not a particularly remarkable mode, Countdown nevertheless delivers on multiplayer urgency and is serviceable enough to entertain.
Lockdown assumes a King of the Hill set up, where you and your team must 'lockdown' zones, turning them into your team's colour by having the most drivers of your colour in the zone at one time, then waiting for five full seconds for a successful capture. Teamwork is crucial in this mode and jostling for control of zones is an invigorating and frantic ordeal worth experiencing, successfully capitalising on ONRUSH's team-based aesthetic, creating a fierce and savage tug of war for zone dominance.
The last mode is Switch, which is like a conventional Overdrive mode, but this time each player has three 'Switches'(essentially vehicles swaps) to use up. You'll start out on a bike, and then transfer to an ATV and lastly to a heavier vehicle-starting you out with the unpredictable and speedy dirt bikes, and culminating with a juggernaut vehicle, meaning as the mode gets tougher and you use up your Switches, the vehicles you get to control become more formidable. Once the three Switches have been exhausted you're technically eliminated, though you can still wreak all the havoc you want and try to eliminate the adversarial survivors still desperately clinging onto their switches. Switch is calculated carnage, but should have been a full-on eliminator style mode because the teamwork element of Switch doesn't quite congeal with the central multiplayer conceits ONRUSH proudly boasts and thus feels a tinge out of place.
With these four modes, the Evolution wing of CodeMasters have done a great job of making ONRUSH feel distinctive and memorable, but the necessity for causing destruction is downplayed by a flavourful but familiar teamwork and multiplayer epidermis. Some will no doubt turn their noses up at ONRUSH because decimating the field and leaving the pack trailing in mechanical detritus is no longer the main hook of the excitable action, but offering your time to its deviancy will eventually show you that good times can be had if you throw out your reservations and ulterior motives for the splendour of smacking the folly off course with reckless abandon. 4 multiplayer modes is pretty anaemic too, but the battlegrounds you wage four-wheeled frenzies on do pick up the slack some.
The untamed rockiness of the terrain is what makes the competitive nature of ONRUSH a glorious and exhilarating thrill ride, with many opportunities for sick jumps, gargantuan descents and marvelling at the kinds of surfaces you'll be racing on. Riding on a huge graffiti-sprayed curve and along narrow metal platforms is a familiar sight as you'll be bolting across dams, rail yards, beaches and refineries-an eclectic mix of levels that can unfortunately bog down into familiarity although the weather and time of days somewhat keeps these tracks from becoming stale in the long run, though more terrain to race on would've certainly alleviated these complaints.
At times controller throttling rage at stumbling into environmental obstacles like concrete walls and tree branches that tend to happen with toe stubbing frequency, leaving you reeling in momentary annoyances time and again, making you feel like an inadequate racer. Suffices to say, ONRUSH's levels reflect its arcade sensibilities wonderfully, but too commonly frustrations cause your death-defying momentum to grind to spark-spitting halt by the devious menace of inanimate objects. The velocity as you thread the eye of say two parallel trains at a train yard is undeniably thrilling, but hitting an obstacle at such an outrageous speed is like smashing your upper set of teeth on a dinner plate-it doesn't taste good.
ONRUSH doesn't forget to be fashionable as there are a bevy of options to customise your character and your ride. These features are elevated by the prize caches you receive when you level up and include clothing items, crashtags and dance animations for characters to perform. Kitting out your riders and their vehicles is a neat customising touch and is coherent with the personality ONRUSH exudes, always in your face and always cool and unrepentantly trendy. There's also a photo mode so you can save and treasure your most electrifying and tranquil moments.
In many ways ONRUSH is a successful experiment, ably discarding the well-worn racing game formula for the sake of a tantalizingly-executed team-based multiplayer game where the hallmarks of destruction and style meet an ebullient mix of gameplay inspirations from a litany of esteemed racing and multiplayer games. ONRUSH is wild and constantly in your grill, never flailing or forgetting its determination to entertain and amuse players. But while ONRUSH succeeds in making a memorable splash, it fails to be a long-term investment with tracks that'll become rote quickly and 4 modes that are hardly enough to sustain its single player portion despite the diversity of challenges on offer. In addition, many hopefuls will be disappointed with the absence of traditional racing and the secondary existence of causing carnage. If you can look past ONRUSH's shortcomings it'll definitely satisfy in short bursts and is quirky enough to stand out in the long run, just don't be duped by its racing game appearance.
STORY: N/A
GAMEPLAY: 8/10
PRESENTATION: 7/10
LIFESPAN: 7/10
SCORE: 7/10
A loud in-your-face alternative racing game that impresses with its emphasis on carnage and teamwork but the rote selection of tracks and game types as well as its Fortnite-aping presentation does get in the way of all that pleasurable Calamity. Overcharging the mark.