Heading Out - A Narrative Road Movie Racing Game Reviews

Loved it

This is buns. The game presents itself as a roadtrip sim with neat driving physics and mechanics with some roguelike mechanics; What can go wrong? A lot. Not to the protagonist though, literally nothing negative happens to you outside of stat decreases, because there is no protagonist. It is a sockpuppet to further the narrative and views the game pushes; You choose three social attributes at the start of the game and that determines how people talk to you and your internal monologue's wording. This is borderline Bethesda tier writing if not worse. There's no character depth or growth, the only actual decisions you'll be making ingame outside of gameplay-adjacent stuff is "YES" (DO SOMETHING) or "NO" (IGNORE IT), the former will yield some kind of gameplay reward most of the time and might affect how people talk about you. There's no buildup to the title the radio people lend you either, all you do is outrun a police car at the start of the game. The political messaging in this game is very much in your face, it's not educating anyone or teaching a good message that is palatable to the people who need to hear it or productive to begin with. It's just all the same back-and-forth arguments that we've been hearing for 10 years. The "good guys" and the "bad guys" are entirely alike outside of political alignment in the sense that they are entirely one-dimensional. None of them have reasons for believing what they believe, or faulty opinions. You can't change what anyone thinks, it's just "THEY ARE THE EVIL BAD GUYS" and "WE ARE THE INFALLIBLE GOOD GUYS". This annoys me greatly.

Game is broken. Black screens on cut scenes, which is a major part of the game. About 5 minutes in, black screen. Shame, really. Good game premise, and I was hoping it'd scratch an itch.

THIS IS A MIXED REVIEW AND ISN'T A FIRM NEGATIVE! IT'S NEGATIVE BECAUSE FOR ME IT WAS MORE BAD THAN GOOD Was expecting more from the driving aspect. Its a great visual style and the sounds are great, but the driving itself feels like your a whale on wheels. I recommend this game to those who like visual novels, because it is more visual novel than driving. Kinda expensive and also feels like a glorified flash game with comic book strips thrown in. Gameplay loop is repetitive and gets kinda boring after awhile from my 1 hour of gameplay. Imo shouldn't be so heavily promoted as an "immersive driving simulator" because its pretty basic from the driving aspect, just race this guy for money and thats about it. NOTE: i personally do not like visual novels, which is most of this game, so if you do like visual novels I recommend. If you like driving games, i wouldnt recommend so heavily because it's simple and very limited in that department.

really nice experience. driving isn't super complicated but it's challenging enough on the top difficulty.

Game felt generally pretty tedious to complete. The gameplay aspect wasn't quite exceptional, as the driving was, well, not great to say the least and the game quite likes lagging hard and the fear meter just sometimes fills up for no reason, while lacking in challenge once you're past all that, music ranged from enjoyable to forgettable, most of the characters felt flat and uninspired without being fun (outside of J.C Leonard, he at least gave some sort of vibe and felt somewhat nuanced unlike the other radio characters who are levels of cliché that makes intentionally cliché GTA satire people feel like wonderfully written characters), and even while I agree with at least the big majority of the political messages of the game, it really, REALLY felt like the game was saying "hey hey hey look look they're the BAD guys we're the GOOD guys REMEMBER they're the MEANIES we're the GOODIES don't forget that!!!" more than actually proving a point, which didn't help the writing that was already massively pretentious and pompous. A proper good point, however, was the game's art direction, and even then I can't quite call it exceptional as I feel like the decors could've used some more furnishing to differentiate them, and the 3D modeling of all 4 of the cars was fine at best, and especially lacking in 1st person and in the damage model (which you will encounter ALL THE TIME, not like you're staying on the road with such "great" driving lmao). TLDR; mid gameplay, absolute waste of a story, alright-ish music and art direction that could've been perfectioned and is not in any way an excuse for the rest of the game's flaws.