BeamNG.drive PS5 review – the best car crashes in gaming

Games like Gran Turismo and Forza Horizon never include proper crashes but this highly realistic racing simulator definitely does.

The venerable Gran Turismo franchise has called itself ‘the real driving simulator’ throughout its 29-year-history, and it’s fair to say that its broad range of cars do have outstandingly realistic handling. Thanks to its licensing agreement with car brands featured in the game, who don’t want their vehicles depicted as smoking hunks of mangled wreckage, its authenticity blind spot is that the worst damage you can do is scratch the paintwork and crack a few windows.

If you’ve ever seen the result of an actual high speed collision, you’ll realise this considerably understates the extreme harm that can be done to a car. As well as damaging paintwork, you’ll find it caves in body panels, concertinas bonnets, snaps axels, and generally leaves them in a state where finishing a race would not be one of your options. If that’s the sort of simulation you’d like to see more of, BeamNG.drive has fun in store.

It entered early access on Steam almost a decade ago, and since then its mostly remote-working, indie development team have steadily added more features to a game that goes a lot further than simply recreating the effects of torque, G-forces, and rubber meeting road. In BeamNG.drive, when your car hits something, its soft-body physics engine models the crash in incredible detail.

The most striking demonstrations of the game’s realism is impacts at speed, where your formerly shiny automobile is reduced to a distorted semi-recognisable block of wreckage, a trail of steam issuing from its shattered radiator, but even glancing blows at much lower velocity can do plenty of damage. You can sometimes get away with clipping a curb, but at other times you’ll find your car’s steering permanently veering to one side, or realise you’ve managed to cave in a wheel, rendering it un-drivable.

In free roam, where you tool around the game’s dozen open world areas, set in various parts of America, Italy, Japan, and unspecified tropical jungles – taking in roads, dirt tracks, and crash test facilities – that’s an easy problem to fix. Tap a single button and your car is completely restored, waiting for you exactly where it left the road. In career mode though, damaging your vehicle comes with far-reaching consequences.

That’s because just towing your car to get it repaired suddenly costs money, let alone the price you’ll pay for spare parts and labour. You’ll also find that after it’s been patched up multiple times, especially when you repeatedly damage the same component, its performance can be irrevocably affected, and with new cars costing way more than fixing existing ones, you may just have to accept that and keep going.

It also makes races, time trials, and the jobs you take on to earn money feel particularly weighty, when a small lapse in judgement could be your undoing. It means getting through races is about more than just perfecting lap times: you’ll need to make sure you keep your car in good enough working order that you’re able to drive it over the finish line. Connecting with a barrier because you’ve misjudged a pre-corner braking distance is no longer a minor inconvenience and can easily be a race-ending misfortune.

This sense of long term significance gives the action a totally different tenor from conventional racing games and BeamNG.drive’s fastidious attention to detail goes further than mere crash physics. The driving model it uses will feel inspiringly intuitive to anyone who’s ever driven a car. It also regularly demonstrates just how easily and swiftly things can go wrong if you go too fast, especially on roads you don’t know.

That level of grit and realism does come at a cost, which is that there are no licensed cars in the game. Instead, it uses fictional vehicles, although if you’re even a part-time petrolhead it’s easy to spot most cars’ real world equivalents. It certainly doesn’t detract from the experience, especially when its range of vehicles spans family, sports, vintage, and rally cars, along with haulage and military vehicles. All are simulated with the same staunch dedication to veracity.

Some things that aren’t as welcome, include other drivers’ AI, which is ponderous at best. When accidents can be so significant, the unfairness of having one caused by the terrible driving of a PlayStation-controlled avatar rankles. You’ll also have to get used to the fact that the line of chevrons drawn onto the tarmac by your satnav doesn’t represent the racing line, as it does in most driving games, and actually tends to be painted down the middle of the road. Follow that at your peril.

Also, for a game with so much detail, it’s inevitable that it would need to use every button on the controller (there are few racing games that let you sit in the passenger seat or get out of the car to inspect crash damage), but that can also make some of its button combinations abstruse to say the least. When entering a race or challenge means having to hold down R1 and triangle, you know there may be some control scheme rationalisation in its future.

And yet it does so many things right, though. One particular standout is the ability to play four-player split-screen, a rarity that players with flatmates or game-loving families will find instantly alluring. It also uses its physics model for all sorts of interesting side jobs, from participating in hair-raising police chases to rock crawling – a sport we’d admittedly never heard of, which has you trundling four-wheel drive jeeps over monstrous concrete obstacle courses that on first inspection look literally impassable.

It’s worth pointing out that BeamNG.drive is still in development. The PlayStation port is billed as early access and is intended to maintain parity with the PC-based original, which is currently on version 0.40, making it apparently far from final release. That means it’s not fair to give it a score, but don’t let that put you off. This is already a brilliant and fully formed game and one of the most enthralling driving experiences currently available without actually climbing into a car.

Formats: PlayStation 5 (reviewed) and PC
Price: £17.99
Publisher: BeamNG
Developer: BeamNG
Release Date: 19th October 2026
Age Rating: 3

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