Independent Games Festival 2008

Rigs of Rods

Developer: Pierre-Michel Ricordel
Genre: Sandbox Car, Plane and Boat Simulator
License: Freeware!

Rigs of Rods is a vehicle simulator which uses a complex flexible physics system and lets players pilot cars, trucks, planes and boats. What makes it so impressive as an indie game however is that it was built by just one man.

Most of the games in IGF 2008 can be split into three categories. There’s the student showcase which shows off the games built by, you guessed it, students. Then there’s the remaining entries, which can be divided into those built by small to medium teams of like minded individuals and fledgling companies – like Introversion Software – and those made by one-man teams.

The one-man team games tend to be smaller and simpler for obvious reasons. Flash games and platformers tend to be flavour of the week for most single coders, while the teams tackle more ambitious projects. Rigs of Rods is the exception to that rule in that it was built by a single man, Pierre-Michel Ricordel, but is still massively complex and makes use of a fully 3D, multi-terrain environment and an incredibly complex physics system.


Now, there are some plus sides and some negative sides to that fact.

On the plus side, it means that what we have is a finely crafted open world (the basic download comes with three maps) which has a wide range of vehicle for players to run around and play in. The attention to detail is quite startling too – it’s not just jump in a car and press forward to drive. The game instead is a true-to-life simulator which forces players to turn the key, take the brake off and go up through all the correct gears, something I’d probably appreciate if I could actually drive.

The physics system also means that you can create some truly awesome crashes, even if the obviously glitchy system does cause the occasional snag. On top of this the game has a massive mod community and there are more than 502 mods available which range from new environments and textures to new vehicles such as hotrods and rockets.

The downside is that the gameplay is quite limited and the game isn’t really bug free or consistent. While levels are large and varied, movement is quite slow on foot and the graphics fluctuate between really quite good and ‘oh look, I walked through a wall and got stuck in the clouds…?’. The game supports dual-core CPUs specifically and can make use of motion blur, bloom and water reflections, but the textures and clipping leave a lot to be desired.


There’s also no real aim in the game and you’re pretty much limited to inventing cool new ways to destroy your ride, of which there are plenty. However, even if you wanted to do this then you’d still be limited by the incredibly slow moving array of default vehicles. I know it’s a simulator, but would it have killed the game to have a faster moving car? The texture-less character can move faster on foot than most of the vehicles we tried.

This is game's major flaw; that there isn’t really anything to do in it and, despite the obvious technical panache and skill, the game suffers from not really being a game and crippling its interactivity with a lack of speed and accessibility. Therefore, we’d be surprised if Rigs of Rods didn’t get at least a nod from the judges in the Technical Excellence category but we highly doubt that it’ll be winning the Audience Award or Seumas McNally Grand Prize.