When it was announced at our very own PC Gaming Show, I thought the premise of TerraTech Legion was pretty irresistible: a Vampire Survivors-like where instead of playing as a person, you’re a fully customisable battle car.
Now there’s a demo available on Steam, and I can confirm two things: building your dream vehicle and then running over hordes of alien robots with it is great, and also I am a terrible driver.
You start each run with a small, pre-built car—the demo only offers one option, a chunky little red one with an SMG on top. But as soon as you’ve levelled up by killing a few enemies, you’re able to start tweaking it with any car pieces you’ve looted.
The super simple system of blocks and parts makes it a surprisingly smooth process to completely reconfigure your vehicle. Blocks simply click together in whatever orientation you choose, and elements like wheels, guns, and gadgets attach to them on a grid. Whenever you want to change things up, it’s as easy as selecting something, pulling it off the car, and sticking it somewhere else or back in your inventory.
This system is the real star of the show, and as you get more and more parts, it’s great fun building up from a little buggy to a bizarre death-truck. The level of freedom it allows is kind of remarkable—as I discovered to my detriment, it will even let you out of the hangar with no wheels—and yet experimenting is never daunting or complicated.
Where things do get a bit more tricky—at least for me—is when you’re actually driving the thing. The game isn’t shy about sending enormous hordes at you, and manoeuvring around them while trying to get a good shot in can be surprisingly hard, particularly because of how much the physics-based handling is affected by your own choices. Several of the car parts have penalties as well as bonuses, affecting things like acceleration and grip, and beyond that how long, wide, and heavy your car is has an obvious impact.
All of which is to say, an embarrassing amount of my deaths so far have occurred during Austin Powers-esque failed three point turns, as I try to slowly get myself back on the right track while cyborg mantises the size of minivans puncture my engine block.
To get the best loot, you need to attack enemy bases, destroying buildings like you’re a unit in an RTS—but these walled fortresses make for quite confined arenas, and without plenty of open road, it’s easy to get yourself into a bad situation. Easy for me, at least.
In this demo, it does feel like the game is missing some kind of meta-progression, allowing you to upgrade somehow between runs to take the sting out of some of these self-inflicted disasters. I’m hoping the final game will include that, alongside the wider array of starting vehicles that can be seen locked off in this build.
But even without that, I’ve been enjoying diving back in after a death to try out a completely different approach. One run I’m a speeding demolitionist, my car’s back bristling with grenade launchers pointed in all four directions. In another, I’m a deadly bumper car, crashing into enemies and tearing them up with a set of giant drills.
It’s great fun, though the more I play, the more I wonder if there might be a bit too much customising happening. Having that freedom is great, but level ups are frequent enough that you end up spending almost as much time building and tweaking as you do actually driving. That can make the pace feel awkward, and when a run does end to misfortune or a silly mistake, it hurts all the more knowing how much time you spent fiddling around in the garage for nothing.
Still, that hasn’t dulled my desire to get my hands on the full game’s wider array of parts and stick them all over my latest stupid creation—and I’m keen to see what marvels cleverer engineers than I are able to put together.
You can try out the TerraTech Legion demo for yourself on Steam now. Just try and drive safer than I do.
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