Smash Every Car in Sight in this Excellent Car Survival Game

Smashing up cars is cool. We all know this. From the destruction derby to Cronenberg's Crash, there is a wide range of media that has been produced to help us think about our relationship between ourselves and smashing, crashing cars. Last Car Standing, a game about doing a smashing to many a car, has now entered into that long tradition. And it's good.

The play of Last Car Standing isn't complicated. You take control of a stock car, and you go around a giant race track. There are other cars, too, that are trying to make this loop. However, unlike a traditional race where the goal might be "to win" or "to get second place," the sole idea here is to be the final car in the ring. The last car standing. Now you get it?

What makes Last Car Standing special is that every car is as resilient as a slice of bread. By that I mean that anything that might hurt a slice of bread—hitting the ground, being scraped against something, being smashed into a car at 80 miles per hour—will make your car fly apart into its constituent pieces. In contrast to other destruction games where you might play a slow war of attrition against your own health total and those of your enemies, Last Car Standing demands that you poke and pray.

The paper towel strength of your vehicle turns the destruction derby into a cautious, fraught experience. It is both humorous (in that hoods, doors, wheels, and every other part of a car flies everywhere) and tense (in that I want to win), and there aren't many games that hold both of those things in tension with one another as well as this free, tech-demo-y game.

A pro tip that might help you experience this game to the maximum: The game allows the player so select the number of cars that race on the track with you. The perfect number of cars to smash and crash with is 9.

You can download Last Car Standing for Windows and Mac on itch.io.

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