Combining the complete abandon for cohesion and logic with realistic car models yields a damn fun package. FUMES is one such bundle of joy.

A retro-inspired arcade vehicular combat game, this Early Access diamond in the rough has been on my personal radar since 2024.

And it clearly WASN’T inspired by titles like Carmageddon (MAX DAMAGE! death shout), Vigilante 8 or any of the Mad Max movies (as evidenced by the NOT M4X license plate found on some cars) at all.

Simple as pie, the formula for fun here is quite blunt:

• Rustbuckets
• Non-hitscan weapons
• High-octane music

A giant playing field is provided for the player, given utter freedom of direction. The story is just barely sprinkled on top of the action. Very little is known about the desolate sand box around you. Apart from the fact that everyone has wheels and everyone has guns.

Graphically, FUMES resembles a PSX title, but offers a wide variety of visual options to make the game look as crunchy or as clear as you’d like.

Dithering filters, color schemes, LOD settings… And if you’re the streaming kind, please be mindful of your viewer’s viewing pleasure. Some of these settings will eat up the bit-rate like a hungry-hungry engine bay eats up 10mm sockets.

The goal, as it would appear at least, is to get to the top of the petrol food chain and crush anyone who gets in your way. You start out with a pitiful little hatchback and a single pea shooter. Almost immediately you get completely obliterated by a cargo ship on monster truck wheels (very Mad Max, very cool).

You are then reduced to an even more pitiful tiny VW Beetle lookalike. From there your journey to the top begins for real. Every foe defeated, every challenge completed and every package delivered net you parts for your murder-mobile.

A friendly faction of scrappers offers their services to you. Their mobile sanctuaries provide a safe haven to repair and modify your vehicles. On top of that, any packages you receive as mission rewards or battle trophies from skirmishes will be stored here.

I would suggest you hold on to those packages for a while until you find appropriate delivery gear and instead focus on the meat and potatoes of the game: wanton vehicle destruction. You are free to engage anyone and anything on the plains of FUMES.

See that mountain? You can scale it. See that convoy? You can jump it. See that harvester? Yeah, that’s gonna flatten you in early game, stay away from Bagger 288 for now.

The ladder is real and you ought to have some serious firepower on top of horsepower if you wish to complete the harder challenges out there. It may remind some people of the voxel fever dream that was Vangers. The 1998 slav-jank title also had a very prominent sense of progression through the ranks as well as bug-like behavior of its vehicles.

These range from the lowly family wagons to party buses, each with different handling, centers of weight and gun slots. Some may carry cargo, others may have more weapon slots than others, but they often only have one slot that provides a 360° aiming angle. Mixing and matching proper weapons is essential to your aiming satisfaction. Not to mention survival.

Dying isn’t that much of a setback. Your machine spirit will simply find another victim to possess and take for its own. The multitude of parts on offer are more about stat trade-offs rather than straight up upgrades, but some tools are more fit for a given job than others. A small hatchback will be maneuverable enough for a convoy pestering mission, but not so much for a boss battle where you will inevitably farm some bullet holes on your chrome.

To contradict my own point, I did make a 6-wheeled Beetle with a rail gun stapled on top, which was so powerful, it nearly knocked the car over every time I shot the weapon. And I beat the final boss with it. Or at least whatever constituted as the final boss in this Early Access version. The game is still in active development, and the FUMES team released an update literally while I was typing out this well-worded preview.

While the core gameplay loop is already a winner in my book, it sorely lacks variety. By hour 3 you’ll have seen most of the tricks this game has for you. Progression becomes routine at this point:

complete 3-4 missions (skirmish, skirmish with a previously beaten mini-boss, race, convoy escort or convoy capture), fight the boss, grind if necessary, repeat. Not much to go around, is there?

This is why it’s advisable to play this game in short bursts, a boss or two at a time, no more. There is another optional activity which I recommend people to spend some time on once they get their hands on a transportation vehicle.

You see, this barren land is home to a few dilapidated brutalist buildings, a lot of outhouses and most importantly – anomalies.

Anomalies come in three flavors: Twisters (tornadoes), Rippers (black holes) and Mashers (rock traps). Passing through any of the supernatural vortices will deal significant damage to anyone stupid enough to do so. The menacing aura ought to drive away even the mid-dest of IQs.

UNLESS you’ve put in the time to deliver a boatload of packages to their respective research stations. You can do it the slow way by collecting packages from missions and bullying other cargo haulers on the road. You can do it the hard way by assaulting a mobile oil rig.

But what I did was find a spot in the mountains where all 3 research stations were in relatively close proximity to each other. Then I simply waited for traveling couriers to overestimate their grip and tumble down, losing packages in the process.

I would then scoop up whatever “fell off the back of a truck” and deliver them to the research stations nearby. After hauling ~20 packages you become immune to a given anomaly, making them prime real-estate to lure your enemies (and especially bosses) into.

As mentioned, the game is in active development, they’ve added the option to shoot out opponents’ tires, making them easier targets. And they’ve been teasing more anomalies as well. So, I’m certain they’ll figure out a way to make sure the 8-hour trek does not drag on as much as it does now.

I really hope more music tracks are added as well. The existing tracks are great, but there’s only about 10 of them.

FUMES is a loving gift for vehicle combat enthusiasts. Simple, fun and best enjoyed in short bursts. Demos are available on both Steam and itch.io. If you like what you see, whichlist it and wait for v1.0.