Rust Highway

They burned the world in an afternoon. We've been driving through the ashes ever since. That is the line the bundled lore opens with, and Rust Highway keeps its promise: it is a game about driving through ashes, very fast, with five people trying to put you in a ditch.

The road

The engine is the old arcade kind. The road is drawn as a pseudo-3D ribbon, banded light and dark so speed reads at a glance, and it bends and climbs under you while the sky scrolls past in layers. It is never the same road twice: every race is generated anew for the chosen location. Hills hide what is coming. Usually it is a barrel.

There are four wastelands, and each one fights in its own way.

Radioactive Wastes: sand drifts, oil slicks and tumbleweeds, under dust storms and radioactive thunder.
Nuclear Winter: black ice, frozen lakes and ice boulders rolling across the lanes in a blizzard.
Abandoned Midwest: hay bales, potholes and tornadoes in the empty farm belt.
Flooded Coast: drowned stretches of road, bridges, floating barrels and a sea storm pushing you sideways.

The Midwest is the one to try first. A tornado on the horizon of a racing game is a sight nobody forgets.

The machines

The four cars are not skins. Weight matters here, and the game keeps score of it in every collision. The Highway Interceptor is the fastest and the most fragile. The Red Cadillac gets more out of every pickup and burns its nitro longer. The Highwayman does everything well enough to survive. And the Wasteland Hauler, an armored semi-tractor, accelerates like a building and then treats the rest of the field as speed bumps. Pick the Hauler once just to watch a lighter rival leave the road sideways.

The sound of the end

The soundtrack is synthesized live in a gloomy 16-bit style: FM bass, pulse arpeggios and noise drums, with its own music for each location. It sounds like a cartridge from the last years of the format, when the composers knew the chip so well they could make it brood.

FIELD TEST. Take the Wasteland Hauler into the Flooded Coast and lean on the first rival who comes alongside. Lighter cars do not stay on the road for long.

Best times are kept for every car and location, so the Run never really ends.