Of course you’d like to play a game where you’re doing motorcycle tricks while shooting bad guys in droves, and also all the people riding the motorcycles are low-poly skeletons and monster mashers with chainsaws and flamethrowers. In what is undeniably one of the best ideas for a genre combo you’ll see this year, Motordoom—sorry, Motördoom—calls itself a “freestyle-sports roguelite horde shooter” and that is a pretty exciting concept.
How do I know it’s a good idea? Because back in 2022, Rollerdrome did something similar, delivering a tight combination of trick shooting and freestyle sport with a precise aesthetic that had us here at PC Gamer rolling out a 94% review for it.
Now Motordoom’s going to take that concept and bump it up a bit higher, adding that delicious combo to a roguelite horde-shooting experience. Racking up combo points in Motordoom’s arenas will get you Demonic Offerings—flamethrowers while you grind rails, kill explosions for the bad guys, you get the drift. Spending some time with the demo, which is out now, I found the concept remarkably compelling if a little floaty on the controls during the slo-mo aerial shots.
And, okay, I’ll be entirely honest, I’m going to play almost any videogame with a duo of motorcycle and sidecar skeletons called the Boner Brothers. I am 100% going to play it for several hours of my life.
Motordoom isn’t shy about wearing its inspirations on its sleeves, either, directly calling out genre greats for where it’s drawing the core mechanics of tricks from. Good. Don’t reinvent the wheel when you’re making your fiery skeleton chainsaw car.
“Ride your chainsaw driven pit bike through a monster filled arena! Perform gnarly tricks like flips, grabs, grinds and manuals and combine them all into the sickest combo the underworld has ever seen,” reads the game’s description. “This arcade freestyle sports game should feel very familiar to anyone who ever played any of the THPS games in the past. Find your own style and do the tricks that you want.”
You can find Motordoom on Steam, where it’s set to release August 2, 2024. There’s a demo you can play now.
