When THQ Nordic announced Stuntfest World Tour a few months back, I was stunned. This isn’t the sequel to Wreckfest (or was Wreckreation, another THQ Nordic racer announced afterwards). It has things that reminded me of what Wreckfest devs Bugbear made before, but this is an effort by a different dev team, Pow Wow Entertainment.
Stuntfest has cars. It has some elements of demolition derby. Your driver can be flung out of the car, though intentionally, and can use stuff like a jetpack wingsuit to fly (or fall down in style).
I probably was flabbergasted so much that I forgot to write up about the news, and with so many unknowns to, sort of just moved on.
Thankfully there is a demo available as part of Steam Next Fest, and immediately I understand what this is.
Stuntfest is not a racing game.
It’s Fall Guys but with cars and jetpacks.
Here’s the missing information Stuntfest doesn’t sell itself enough- it’s a multiplayer game show game with a battle royale format.
Understandably, nobody wants to market their game as another battle royale- and I don’t think a “Fall Guys-like” will make folks immediately want to buy a game- but the key point is that contestants will play multiple rounds to eliminate the weakest links until the remaining few can enter the final challenge and be crowned the winner: the best of the fest.
Think about it. Replace those 30 or so stumbling and bumbling jellybeans with 18 online players in smashable cars and Stuntfest makes a load more sense. And there are various different rounds where it can be racing around a track, or it can be about doing wacky, death-defying stunts which these daredevils would just brush off as if they are Fall Guys jellybeans- minus the silly cross-over costumes. One round it can be a demolition derby wreck fest, another has you fling your driver over a huge dam to see who can be thrown out of a car the furthest, and another has you flying your jetpack/wingsuit thing.
And have you seen the colourful, wacky props and obstacles the canyon is full off?
For the small niche demographic that are fans of cars and Fall Guys, Stuntfest as a concept sounds awesome and potentially fun.
Even the normal race event has a twist. In Stuntfest, you can have your driver eject from the car at an angle, depending on how long you press the eject (jump?) button. The cool thing is, you actually go faster when being flung, and you can magically summon your car and be in the driver seat again at any time so long it’s not on cooldown. And you can use this to not only skip through jumps, but also find shortcuts where you must navigate it by having your driver ragdoll fall gracefully over jumps and gaps. You get big gains for successfully flinging yourself through the wild shortcuts, but it will set you back a ton if you messed up the landing.
What I tried of the demo, I can feel the glimmer of a potential- this otherwise messy, unknown game now suddenly clicks and finally makes sense. Stuntfest might be on to something here.
But still, I am more in love with the idea of Stuntfest as a concept, rather than the game itself. The demo is a pre-alpha version of the game, and as such, there are still a lot of rough edges.
Some of the critiques I have with this pre-alpha release on Stuntfest. The cars don’t feel fun to drive, they’re a bit too understeery. If the idea is to promote handbrake drifting to get around tight bends, then the drifting handling, and the transition from normal handling to drift handling, is still off and doesn’t feel satisfying. On that note, while the cars can deform, take damage and break apart, there isn’t that much oomph when smashing (or getting smashed) by other cars. Some of the tracks have way too stingy out-of-bounds detection, that if you keep hitting the wall over and over it will respawn you to the previous checkpoint when all you did was driving terribly, because the car understeers so much. Also, the post-round presentation goes way, way too long and draggy. I understand it’s to hype up the leaderboards and see how everyone stacks up (and who gets eliminated) but if that can be made more concise, that would help keeping up the momentum to the next round.
There’s still a lot more work to do, and the devs definitely know this already from a previous pre-alpha test. And I’m not sure still if any of the other mechanics like the gadgets/powerup system and the on-foot gameplay are currently in a good state or not either.
It’s still pretty cool to see a publisher and developer brave enough to run a multiplayer demo at this stage of development. Though I hope this game is given enough time to continue being worked on. There’s a good idea here, but the execution is still off the mark.
Stuntfest World Tour has no release date yet and so far is only confirmed to be heading to PC via Steam.