BeamNG.drive is one of those "big niche" games that, if you live on a certain corner of the internet, is a huge deal — but if you don't, you may never have heard of it at all. It's a driving sim, known for extremely realistic "soft-body" physics, that launched on Steam 11 years ago and has been in early access the whole time. As of today, it's also available on PlayStation 5.
Over those 11 years, BeamNG.drive has slowly but steadily built up a sizable audience, to the extent that it's currently the second-biggest driving game on Steam, ahead of Forza Horizon 6 and behind the mighty Euro Truck Simulator 2. I suspect it's going to do pretty well on PS5, too. If you're into car games — and a lot of PlayStation gamers are — you don't have to spend very long on car-game YouTube before BeamNG.drive is invoked, often in pretty breathless terms.
The PS5 version of Forza Horizon 6 just got pushed back to January. And PS5 might be the cheapest way to run this demanding, computationally expensive game at decent fidelity. Never having dabbled in BeamNG.drive before, I spent a few hours mucking around with the PS5 version.
At the outset, the game warns you to expect a different experience to your average racing game, and it's not wrong. But only some of this is down to its remarkable simulation engine. Much of it is that BeamNG.drive is an unrestricted, unrefined simulation sandbox, and that the developers at BeamNG are clearly still in the process of figuring out how to curate it, and how to design within it.
I gather that it's a lot more accessible than it used to be. There is now an "onboarding" tutorial, which shows you how to use the byzantine interface to spawn new vehicles and set them on fire as well as drive them. There are recommended Quick-Start experiences.
And there's a Career, too, which is a slightly more curated version of the game's Freeroam mode in which you buy your car, earn money, and take out insurance to pay for your repairs. Repairing your car is something you will need to do often, because BeamNG.drive's principal selling point is its astounding crash dynamics. Soft-body physics means that every component of the car, down to individual suspension and engine parts, is simulated individually to derive its realistic behaviour, rather than being a manually-coded simulacrum that can ignore anything that's inconvenient to the game designer. (Or to the car company that licensed the car; BeamNG.drive only has fictional vehicles.) If you smash your car into a tree at speed in BeamNG.drive, it won't go anymore — because the suspension's broken, or a wheel is missing, or the engine's been cleaved right off the chassis.
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