Demolition Derby VR is a game which is part of a series of car destruction and demolition game. Demolition Derby VR is the Google Cardboard version of the Demolition Derby game. Obviously, I was interested in the virtual reality version of the game.
Let me tell you in advance, I am a fan of car racing and bumper cars, where there are a mayhem and cars in a game, you can count me in. The Demolition Derby series is very popular and according to the developer, it already exceeded 20 million downloads.
So I downloaded the game, set up my phone and was ready to see what this game has to offer. When I first launched it, I found myself inside the garage. In the garage, you have several things to do: you can browse through your cars and view their stats (e.g. acceleration, health, handling, weight, etc.), a dashboard to view your kills, deaths, K/D and other statistics and there are two doors, one lead to an offline quick match, while the second one leads to an online quick match.
In the offline quick match, you compete against bots, and this is a good place to start to learn the gameplay mechanics before jumping to compete against real players, The online multiplayer quickmatching will pit you against other against 5 other players, although when I played, for an hour, I've only seen a single real player in one of the matches, the other places were replaced by AI cars.
In the dashboard of the camera, you can see your current place, how much time it left until the end of the round and your car's health. When the game starts, you need to crash into other cars and reduce their health and you gets points for each hit. If your health reaches zero, you respawn again. The player that has the highest score at the end of the round, wins the match.
The race takes place in a closed area in various places, some in daylight others at night. The car automatically moves forward when you start the game. You can control the steering wheel by moving you head to the direction you want the car to move to, and look back to make it move in reverse. The gameplay mechanics are really simple and straightforward and the focus is on the action itself.
I did feel a beat of a neck stress after playing it for a like 15 minutes straight because you really found yourself moving your head a lot during a single game session. I personally would have preferred to play it with a gamepad rather than gazed-based, but that's my personal preference. I also would have liked to see more players in the online matches and maybe an option to play against friends, and I hope that more players will download the game (it's free after all) and play it, so I can play against more real players, and not against bots. It also would have been nice to have a more satosfactory progression system and a car customization option. That being said, all those things doesn't take away too much for the experience.
The game is so much fun. I didn't know that I would enjoy it so much. It really feels great bumping into the other cars, especially when I bumped into a real player and saw him aiming his car at me because he also knew I am a real player (the name of the players and if there are bots or not are shown above the car).
I think it would be cool to have a Bumper cars game like the ones in the Lunapark, you know, those electrically powered cars, I loved them as a child and it would be great if there was an option to work on the physics and the theme to make the game mimic that experience. Maybe in another version of the game or as an expansion.
Demolition Derby VR is exactly the game I didn't even know I needed to play. I enjoyed every second of it. Playing it in VR feels great because you can really feel the adrenaline rush of driving at fast speed and crashing into other cars, something you most probably won't do or able to do in real life. This is why people enjoy the Bumper cars so much, is a completely different experience that you don't get to experience every day, and Demolition Derby VR brings that great experience to life in VR. This is a Google Cardboard game that you really don't want to miss out.
Demolition Derby VR was released on December 20, 2016, and is available for download for iOS and Android smartphone from their corresponding app stores. Here in VR, we were very impressed with the game and I personally looking forward to getting back to the game, improve my driving skills and rank up.