Airframe Ultra is Wipeout crossed with Road Rash

Podracing with a pipe wrench, Airframe Ultra is a game of hoverbike violence with a smeary, low-poly look reminiscent of the blurred textures of the PS1 era. Hey, who needs detailed models when you're only going to see them while speeding past as they explode into gibs? 

Airframe Ultra is set in the world of Ultra Circuit racing, a future sport where players "from the cracked asphalt of San Juaro and the Ysidro edgelands to the hulking megacities of the Texicali ZEGO zone" compete on combat jetbikes called airframes. In the dystopian Southlands, first place in an underground death sport is apparently worth the extremely high risk of decapitation.

Tracks we'll be racing and dying on include "a neon sewer, a mummified mall, or the overgrown gardens of a high tech high rise", with pipes, chains, and guns among the weapons we'll be able to brutalize the other racers with.

It's an unusual next step for the Boston-based developer Videocult, which is most famous for Rain World, but I can definitely see myself committing acts of the old ultraviolence at top speed across what look like the streets of Silent Hill 1. Airframe Ultra will have splitscreen local multiplayer, and is available to wishlist on Steam.

Jody Macgregor
Weekend/AU Editor

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.

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