If there was an award for videogame vehicle of the year (get on that, Game Awards) then the 2025 award would surely go to the Kei truck. The world's cutest lorry delivered a brilliant comedic performance in April's open-world driving sim Promise Mascot Agency, before offering a stranger, more haunting turn in September's Easy Deliver co. Now, it's targeting a mainstream audience in the indie action blockbuster DriveCrazy, a racing game in which you use a Kei Truck to outrun the apocalypse.
The demo of DriveCrazy, which I took for a quick whirl, starts off with you participating in an annual Kei Truck rally. Even in this comparatively normal mode, things are pretty wild. Literally anything you do while driving earns you points. Drive cleanly? Points. Knock down a lamppost? Points! Smash through a hedge, spin your truck 360, and bin it off the road into a rice paddy? Points, points, points.
No sooner have you completed the rally when oh no, aliens invade! Suddenly you're trying to outrun missiles and laser strikes while buildings collapse around you. Fortunately, your Kei Truck is a vehicular superhero, able to doughnut on demand, wall-ride, drive on two wheels, and accelerate to near-supersonic speeds thanks to a sizzling blue afterburner.
There's clearly a big dollop of Burnout in DriveCrazy's DNA, but it reminds me as much of early 2000s open-world racer Midtown Madness. This is, admittedly, because the world feels a bit like it's made out of polystyrene, with parked cars and other objects rebounding from your truck in somewhat floaty collisions.
DriveCrazy gets away with this, however, due to its tongue-in-cheek flavour and relentless pace. The environment is simply not happy unless it is exploding, while the frantic survivalist racing is interspersed with boss fights against enormous enemies such as a giant bear with glowing eyes.
DriveCrazy launched out of early access earlier this week, its 1.0 update rounding out the experience with several new features. These include two new stages to propel yourself through, an extra boss fight, the ability to load supplies onto the truck bed, and an ending cutscene. If it sounds like your bag, the racer's currently on a 20% launch discount until Christmas Day, bringing the price down from an already-reasonable $9(£7.50) to $7.19(£6).
