Test Driven: Heatwarped, Steam Demo

Welcome to Test Driven, a look at previews, demos, and unfinished builds of racing games new, and old. It's the amuse-bouche to understand what the chef is going to serve you when it comes to the full meal, and a deeper dive into history if it calls for it. It can be a demo found on a disc in a magazine, an official press preview, or tucked away in a full release to show off what else the publisher has on offer.

And if you developing a game and want me to try and then write about it, you can always drop me a line.

This edition of Test Driven looks at the Steam demo for Heatwarped.

I return to darkened streets aglow from the streetlamps above a changed person. It's been a long twenty plus years, and we have all seen and experienced so much since that first time we all collectively went to Bayview. It's normal to yearn to go back to have that first experience again; zooming around downtown before ending up at a green and purple Nissan 350Z at the arrivals area at the airport, but there's now generations that never had that moment and don't have the means to truly experience that. Well, not until this last week.

The sudden announcement of Heatwarped paired with a playable demo came out of the blue and it felt like a wave of people got swept off their feet. Infinite waves of nostalgia for a franchise firing on all cylinders and the revolution in the racing game genre that they would spearhead for better or for worse. It was the absolute pinnacle for a trend in car culture that welcomed excess, bright designs, and cars with character that weren't afraid to get wild. It's a trend that is trying to make a comeback as a rejection of clean culture, and of a mindset that showing emotion is a sign of weakness, which has dominated car shows and social media for a decade now. There is perhaps no better time for those who lived through it the first time around to try and bring it back in the virtual world, make it new, and bring hose experiences and emotions to new generations.

But something has been lost in those twenty years.

The world Heatwarped is being developed in is one of lost innocence. Those who lived through Need For Speed Underground 2 hitting the streets as a major formative experience have had to deal with multiple financial crises, a pandemic that hasn't ended, and the uncertainty over capitalism at it's most extreme and the accelerating climate change it's causing. A big part of internet literacy is trying to snuff out truth from fiction, and especially when it comes to figure out of something is real, or if it's a part of capitalism's new favorite tool in generative ai. It's a disaster when it comes to new games being announced that try to avoid paying people to do their job, and give access to skills to those in power without having to put in the work to actually learn the dark art of coding, art, or music. If something feels too good to be true, then what's the catch?

For a lot of people, Heatwarped does feel too good to be true. It's meant to be a tribute to Need For Speeds of yore with a huge emphasis on Underground 2 and it looks like, as CookiePLMonster put it on Bluesky, if a time traveler kicked a rock that this could have been NFSU2 instead. It's truly remarkable how close Heatwarped is in terms of it's visual style, physical model fidelity and texturing to the original articles; but that's for a reason.

The members of Sealime Team as well as the external help they've had along the way have all cut their teeth playing and modding Need for Speeds new and old, learning how these games ticked along the way and going as far as one can without having the actual keys of the kingdom from EA. In such a visually accurate recreation of those old worlds, menus that are obviously birthed from the rib of Carbon and Underground 2, and nomenclature within the drift mode scoring being an exact copy from the original Underground, those who are concerned that the wool is being pulled over their eyes don't feel unfounded in the claim that may be treading in murky waters in terms of the core of the engine and it's code. It opens up the possibility of what the powers that be could do even if it isn't the case; Electronic Arts's lawyers do scare me in the same way Disney's do. But if that isn't the case, and it truly is true that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, what does the demo for Heatwarped make me feel and think?

I'm taken back to the early 2000s in another way, to watching NASCAR on Fox or NBC. In those days I couldn't just move my attention away to whatever game I was playing or to my computer, because I was that invested in watching Jeff Gordon and it would be another decade until I did have a laptop. That meant also watching the commercials that would happen, and the inundation of all the big brands that had gravitated to what was, at the time, the biggest racing series in the world. If a company had a major tv ad campaign, they were going to have a slot or two going on any given Sunday.

The series of commercials in particular that came to my mind were from the early days of telecom company Verizon. The commercials of a guy walking around with a cellular telephone asking 'Can you hear me now? Good.' as a means to show off the quality of cell reception was brilliant. It's the most basic form of the Telephone Game there is; do you hear me, yes or no?

With such an intimate knowledge of the sources of inspiration, and the assumption of things being faithfully recreated rather than being stolen, I come away from the demo of Heatwarped more of it like a game of telephone rather than falling into outright cynicism. But that exchange in information and data from the source material to a new pair of hands doesn't always give the truest form of what was meant to be said. We don't all interpret the world, the games we play, and how they drive the same way though we can often reach similar conclusions.

Something like nailing the visual style is relatively easy to translate, it's then a matter of making, buying and modifying assets to fit the pseudo-realistic style of rendering that was the norm in the early 2000s. The same goes for sound effects, engine noises, particle effects, basic game mechanics and structures that are now commonplace when they were once wet behind the ears. It's a matter of putting that all together into a game is where that challenge in translating and interpreting over the phone comes in: making it drive, race and play the way it should.

It was a dark art that Black Box perfected after the turn of the millennium; their driving model was as good as it got in terms of grip-based driving and racing that wasn't trying to be realistic. They had also dialed in how chase cameras should interact both dependent and independent of what the car was doing and the inputs the player was putting in at any time. There are so many moving parts at work to make sure it all comes together, and trying to parse what's being told to you while also not simply using old code you no doubt have access to. Perhaps using that old code to aid in private prototypes is ethically vague enough, before then actually having to make it your own.

What the Sealime Team have been able to do is in the ballpark of how such a game should drive and be perceived, but more time in the lab is definitely required. There is this sensation that the front and rear tires aren't working in lockstep with each other, with the rears feeling like they are perpetually toed out while the chase camera further allows the rears to slide to the outside too much with it's pivot point being too high and too far forward. The front tires don't feel like they're doing as much of the actual steering of the car as they should, and I'm given the impression that I'm gliding over the surface like in Wipeout HD rather than driving a car. The grip levels and overall chassis rigidity isn't there yet, but the nature of the driving physics paired with the somewhat lazy nature that the chase camera rotates around corners behind the car does feel incredibly good if you do a slow speed handbrake turn. With the grip driving within free roam and in racing though, the amount of yaw possible in while in normal circumstances is simply too much. It's in the ballpark, but what's been understood in that phone call needed a bit more time to really understand the nuance of the message that was told.

That loss in translation can be felt in the drift driving too. There's a lack of positive responses to inputs in trying to get the car to initiate a drift or chain drifts together. It's numb feeling, and the way the car speed has been neutered within the drift handing model lacks any sensation that you're carrying momentum drift to drift. That feeling that the front tires isn't doing as much of the work as they should still persists, but now it can result in extreme angles that can't be recovered with how easily the rear swings out. It's a clunky experience trying to chain drifts together as you're battling the opponents' score tally persistently goes up, that perhaps much simpler drift courses would have worked better in getting people up to speed.

The drift model leans too much on the tenants of the grip driving model, and doesn't stand out on it's own enough at this point. Watching a video of someone who's already mastered the craft it's hard to tell what's going on, but then you do a game of telephone yourself to try and see if you can match a score nudging towards six figures that the car isn't quite doing what you're wanting it to do. Much of the principals of the drift models in Need For Speed Underground and NFSU2 emphasized the fun of whipping a car back and fourth and sliding through longer zones in trying to rack up a massive score. In making a new drift model from scratch, birthed from the rib of the grip model, it finds itself in a no man's land of being technically right with what the developers were told it should do in the game of telephone but it's been understood too literally and is lacking the pretense that allowed it to since more than twenty years ago.

Importantly, there is a direction to go from here to recreated what the past was saying should be done but in a new and improved way. For a racing game, having that direction forward to make it drive more fun is worth the challenge of getting it right.

The actual demo itself is quite sizable, and feels like an extended version of the Need For Speed Underground 2 demo that was available in Burnout 3: Takedown. One region of the free roam world is available with one race per discipline available initially, but now with the added functionality of being able to customize your car in terms of both visual and performance upgrades. Completing that first set of races unlocks a second set of races run using reverse layouts, and much more competitive opponents at hand. The second set of opponents are perhaps too strong for a demo, when it should be about getting people back into the swing of things and giving new generations a first taste of how the racing game genre once was.

Not everybody who is playing the Heatwarped demo is a grizzled vet of the genre, and that's something that needs to be remembered now that it's back to the trenches for the Sealime Team. It's the forever balance that has to be grappled with in a broader sense in making sure the game is accessible while a worthy challenge for those who have the racing game genre be their bread and butter, but at least now the science of making ai that can drive and race in a free roam environment has been fully understood to where their pace across difficulties can be better handled without needing rubber-banding mechanics. That is the power and strength of another 20 plus years of games that have come and gone: good ideas and principals are universal from game to game.

With the abdication of AAA developers from making creative and risky games that are a tough sell to shareholders, they've given hobby developers the chance to make the games that they refuse to make. The Fine, I'll do it myself genre is a direct response to capitalism not caring about a past that should keep going into the future. It's how we got Bug Fables, and will be getting Panline and now Heatwarped.

There is so much that's in store with the second franchise originally from EA getting new life from indie developers. The groundwork is there for something truly special to hit new generations of gamers at the right time. It's just a matter of letting those creative juices run free, and listening to those phantoms of the past in the hope they will continue to guide the way. Can you hear them now?

You can download the demo for Heatwarped and wishlist the game on Steam. A full release will come when it's ready.