At first I didn’t understand why it took four years for the makers of iRacing and the independent developer Orontes Games to present a playable version of Exocross (which originally bore the working name) “Pull”) to today’s release date. But now I realize what happened. The quality has dropped. What Orontes Games has developed is most likely the physical basis on which iRacing 2 will be based, and of course that takes a long time. Exocross is based on its own game engine, where the four wheels are physically simulated independently, as are the four individual shock absorbers, and on top of that there is the flexing of the chassis, something that very few racing simulators have dared to imitate what happens to a real car under heavy load.
Exocross is a strange product, perhaps even one of the most contradictory games I’ve played in years. It’s basically an arcade racer in the style of Mario Kart, Motorstorm or Flatout, where you drive a sort of moon buggy on an alien planet and are asked to win by any means necessary against a bunch of other cars on tracks that look like something out of Wreckfest. It’s all about driving as fast as you can on dirt roads, outrunning your opponents and constantly pushing the limits no matter what the road in front of you looks like. Arcade racing, pure and simple. The fact is, for me, that the developers have always gone for realistic and detailed off-road physics, which in some ways goes against the “fun factor” of the game. As a result, Exocross feels slow and lacks the feeling of speed, excitement, explosiveness and adrenaline that the best games in the genre always offer.
Another aspect that doesn’t convince me is that Exocross has too realistic an aesthetic to fit the arcade racing environment and lacks imagination, playfulness and color, which quickly becomes boring. The developers should have spiced up the design with something that doesn’t just look like a big gray-brown gravel pit, but above all decorate the tracks with things like spectators, houses or other buildings to create a greater feeling of speed. Exocross (released in Early Access in December 2020 and now 100% finished) looks more like a physics prototype than a full-fledged racing game in my opinion, and the fact that it costs 38.99 dollars is hard to digest.
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There is no real career mode, the multiplayer part lacks variety and immersion, and the races are often very monotonous. The four (only four!) tracks are boring and lack interesting or original elements, and I think the artificial intelligence of the opposing cars is poor at best. The physics of the cars are clearly impressive, and I firmly believe that iRacing can achieve some really impressive things with this system in the future, especially when it comes to the realistic movements of the chassis. However, Exocross is not a very fun game at the moment.
