Fumes is a fun framework of a game. It's basically a tech demo right now. The bones are there, but there's not much meat on them yet. I played about 10 hours and hit the "you've beaten everything in EA, go muck around" screen. Credit where it's due, it's quite honest of the devs to just put a screen like that up instead of pretending there's more.
The game looks very good. It's 3D but rendered with pixel art textures and it works. Also, thank god you can turn off the horrible filter the game starts you with, because the game looks so much better without it. A small detail I very much like is that your HUD is actually drawn in the game world, so it gets affected by lighting and rain :)
The music is honestly grating and repetitive, since you'll hear the same handful of tracks on loop constantly. It's better to just turn it off and put on your own. Play Chapter Doof from youtube for the FULL experience.
There's a lot of simulation happening under the hood, anti-lag, suspension, physics, and so on, which is genuinely impressive for a team this size. I'll give them that. I don't actually like the driving that much, though. Some suspensions feel super slippery and drifty, which means you'll probably end up using the same few suspensions on every car regardless of what else is available.
On the cars specifically: I find the half-track/tracked suspensions a lot better than any of the wheels, except maybe the monster truck wheels. The tracks are how I'd want all the cars to feel, minus the on-the-spot turning they allow. Car guns often make you wobble a lot while firing, which is much less of a problem on tracks. But not being able to drive straight while firing your guns on wheels with certain weapon types is questionable. Separately, enemy explosive weapons move you around a lot too, to the point of getting juggled in place and losing the ability to aim or move properly. This is mainly an issue with some of the bosses.
Combat itself is incredibly simplistic and at times boring. There's no real precision movement available to you, and the arenas are basically nonexistent, you're just doing everything in open fields. Combat mostly amounts to driving in one direction and shooting, occasionally turning around to repeat the process, with enemies scattered in front of or behind you. Outside of your car, suspension, and weapon choices, moving, shooting, and boosting is basically all you can do.
To change your loadout you enter a big truck called the Scrapper, and by the umpteenth time I found this genuinely grating. You need to find a Scrapper, get near it, tell it to stop, then enter it, and you can't even access your in-game settings while inside. You can save cars in the Scrapper, and if you could swap between saved loadouts on the fly, I wouldn't mind this much. But to actually experiment with cars and weapons, you have to enter a Scrapper, change your setup, leave to test it, and re-enter if it's not working out.
On the gameplay front more broadly, a lot of the cars, suspensions, and weapons are stinkers or become stinkers over time. As you progress you unlock new cars, weapons, and parts, but so do the enemies, and more of them spawn the further you get. That means you're pretty much funneled into the same handful of guns and cars, because later on, if you don't have decent health, decent speed, and a weapon loadout that can clear a lot of enemies and handle armored ones, you're in for a slog or you just die.
I was genuinely excited to get a cannon, the Pounder, so I could broadside people in the van (TALLY HO), but it disappointed me, and somehow this game also managed to mess up a minigun, the Rotor. The Pounder requires way too much precision for the amount of knockback it puts on your own vehicle, which makes it hard to use on some cars if not outright miserable. It's also not even explosive, despite being a cannon. The Rotor, meanwhile, gets outclassed by the starting machine gun, the Automat, which has good spread, damage, and range all the way through the game, while the Rotor has short range, huge spread, and negligible damage. I didn't find the mortar fun to use either, and the mines kind of suck. The grenade launcher and missile battery both cover whatever you're aiming at in smoke trails, so you can't actually see what you're shooting at. On top of all that, the game basically funnels you into explosive weapons because they're good against everything, and armored enemies further narrow what's viable since different weapons deal different amounts of armor damage.
Games like this thrive on player decision and expressing yourself through combat and customization, and Fumes doesn't really deliver that. I also found the stickers unintuitive, you apparently can't even place them on the front or top of your car, which is pretty meh.
Something else I dislike is how much the Scrapper NPC talks. If you randomly kill a roaming NPC, he'll comment on it in a guilt-trippy way ("having fun, huh?"), which I'm not a fan of at all. This is a Mortal Engines/Mad Max inspired game, and you get guilted for frying some poor bastard for no reason? I don't get that. The Scrapper also talks constantly during missions, which you have to confirm away, and bosses trigger little cutscenes you also have to confirm away. Small stuff, but it'd be nice if you could just turn it off.
The most boring thing I found in the demo was transporting cargo. You can swap some weapon slots for cargo module slots, or use cars with dedicated cargo slots, then haul cargo around to deposit at an anomaly for rewards. Fully completing an anomaly's cargo requirement makes all anomalies of that type friendly to you while staying hostile to enemy cars. But you don't actually need to fully research an anomaly to lead a boss into one and crumple it for big damage anyway, so I'm not sure what the point is. Getting immunity to anomalies plus a batch of parts isn't much of a reward, since you get parts just from playing the game normally, and I didn't get any high-tier parts from doing these anomalies either, since parts have their own tier system. They're also just boring to do, since it's a lot of back and forth, and it's worse early on. The late-game Bizon can clear an anomaly's cargo requirement very quickly given how much it can hold, but doing one early on takes forever. You'll occasionally get harassed by pirate cars during these runs, and it's just a basic combat encounter, but it's a lot easier to just wait until you have bigger cars with more storage before bothering, at which point, what's the point?
I spent most of my playtime in the same couple of biomes before finding a snow forest biome that looks cool but never saw it prior. Between mission start locations and Scrappers being everywhere, you're not really incentivized to travel, since there's nothing to really find, anomalies, Scrappers, missions, it's all a short drive away regardless of where you are. The biomes themselves are pretty barren and flat. There are occasional city structures in small clusters that you just drive straight through and destroy, there's no weaving between them required, they're just destructibles, and the clusters are so small you'd really want a proper full city biome instead.
I can't speak to the multiplayer since I only played singleplayer, so I won't say whether it's good or not.
My verdict is to come back in 6-12 months once more content's been added. The devs are working diligently on it, and with a team of just 4 people, too. The game goes on sale often, so if you feel the pull to try it, go for it.
Despite all my babbling i don't hate the game. if I hated the game i wouldn't be making this review.
(You guys remember D.I.P.R.I.P, by chance?)
