Planned Release Date: Nov 11, 2025

About This Game

Nitronic Rush is an experimental survival driving game. Using the car’s many abilities (including boost, wings, and jump), avoid obstacles that the city throws at you. In many ways the game is a tribute to racing games of the 1990s but with fresh graphics, audio, and gameplay.

This was a student project made at DigiPen as our junior project.  Hand-crafted from the ground up (not even a pre-made engine) over 17 months.  By a team of 5 which grew to 11.  This would eventually lead to Distance (also available on Steam!) as this game's spiritual successor.

We were inspired by games like San Francisco Rush 2049 and Super Meat Boy, and media like Tron Legacy (hence this game's mash-up name).  Inside you'll find a heavy focus on arcadey car behavior; surviving levels that want you to crash; pretty, glowy visuals; and music that reacts to your use of the car's abilities.

Game Modes

• Story.  All car abilities are available.  Play through the more approachable levels, along with environmental story telling and short cinematics book-ending the experience.  If replayed from the arcade menu, story levels will include ghosts of prior runs to race against.

• Hardcore.  Harder remixes of the story levels, plus brand new levels.  Wings are disabled.  This is where you'll most use this game's core features: manual rotation of your car, paired with automatically sticking to any surfaces your wheels touch if/while you're going fast enough.

• Challenge.  No checkpoints.  Survive the whole level in one go.  On completion, see a replay of all attempts simultaneously play out together, with just the final one making it all the way through (a style of replay created/popularized by Super Meat Boy).

• Stunt.  Rack up as many trick points as possible within a set amount of time.

• Old Levels.  Some of our levels from earlier in development.  These weren't deemed necessary for the game, but they're here, so we may as well leave them available for anyone interested in seeing them.  Some include older music you won't hear elsewhere in the game, as well.

• Community Hardcore / Challenge.  Levels made by dedicated folks in the community who learned to use the level editor mostly intended for use by devs.  Many thanks to Pixelmann, Chiigan, Zallist, Haligen, Ciastex, Fzeroman, Quargzon, and Zarozorak.  Some of whom would later work directly on Distance.

Other Features

• High score board and ghost replays.  Watch and race against the best runs.

• Multiple unlockable vehicles.  Some less polished vehicles are also tucked away in the game's data, for those interested enough to poke around looking for it.

• In-game achievements, with tracked values.  When viewing the list of achievements, you'll see how many times you've performed any related actions (for achievements of those styles).

• LAN auto-discovery of other players.  If someone on your local network is playing on the same level, you'll be able to see each other's vehicles.  This was a test feature added after the game's initial release, and so has no further gameplay beyond this.

• Developer's level editor.  This takes following a set of instructions to enable developer hotkeys and menus, and is not generally intended for wide use.  But we didn't see any reason to disable it when releasing the game.  To learn how to use it, see our designer's videos by searching online for "nitronic rush level editor".