I enjoyed my share of Twisted Metal as a kid, but I never loved Twisted Metal—and I think it’s because the drivers were corny. I know a lot of people love Sweet Tooth, but I just wanted to experience cars shooting and exploding each other without any clown-related distractions.
Fumes understands me. In the early access car combat game’s post-apocalyptic wasteland, there are no drivers. There are only cars, and weapons strapped to cars, and the fast, chaotic, pixelated machine violence that occurs when they drive at each other at high speeds.
When I first fired up the game, I was a muscle car in the desert, where I was attacked by other muscle cars. They had sawblades, and I had a machinegun. The machinegun won. But after scrapping my vehicular assailants, the sky blackened with an ungodly lightning storm and a sort of battleship on monster truck wheels appeared and destroyed me with missiles while it honked like a demonic foghorn.
At first I thought this was bad. But it turns out that I’m actually an intelligent, immortal cloud of purple chemical vapor that can simply haunt a new Mad Max car body when my old car body gets exploded, which lets me embark on a vengeful road trip of vehicular conquest across an infinite procedural wasteland. This is Fumes, and I am fumes, and Fumes is good.
Fumes is, at its heart, three things: loose, bouncy suspensions, car-mounted turrets with infinite ammo, and crunchy PS1 graphics. If that’s not enough—even though it should be—it’s got randomized loot. It’s got unlockable, scalable decals for car customization, and you can export and share your designs with other players. It has a surprisingly capable photo mode. It yells “FUUUMES” at you when you exit the game. It rules.
Being very early in its early access, I’ll admit that it’s a little repetitive. Aside from boss fights and an occasional race, there are just two main types of combat activity, and you’ll be doing a lot of them as you gradually unlock new cars, parts, and weapons.
Luckily, hitting the boost button to charge at enemy cars while blasting away with a pair of shotgun turrets feels good enough that I don’t particularly mind. And if you look at the in-game roadmap—where 4-person developer Fumes Team reminds us that “roadmap always changes”—the very first feature listed for eventual improvement is “more activities and race modes.”
It also lists “proper story, lore, and missions,” so you can imagine how excited I am to learn more about the rich worldbuilding behind the car-haunting stink clouds. If you want to become the possessed Mad Max car you were always meant to be, Fumes is available in early access on Steam now.