Planned Release Date: To be announced

About This Game

Dark Engines is a white-knuckle medieval car combat game inspired by the golden era of vehicular combat. Blast your way through the character-driven campaign and brutal online multiplayer. Carve your path across a growing campaign map, unlock new juggernauts, powers, and cosmetics, and fight toward each rider’s final showdown and epic conclusion.

Choose Your Juggernaut

• Every juggernaut rider has their own stats, handling, passive ability, and special move. Find the vehicle that fits your style and master its strengths on the battlefield.

Weapons, Destruction, and Arena Combat

• Wield purposeful weapons and imbue them with fire, ice, or lightning. Fight across handcrafted arenas filled with weapon drops, tactical objectives, AI enemies, bosses, and destructible sections that can change the flow of battle.

Game Modes Built for Chaos

• Take on classic modes like Capture the Flag, King of the Hill, and Last Man Standing, alongside original modes like Slay the Dragon and Fire and Ice.

• In Fire and Ice, teams fight to control a hill and claim the power of fire, while the remaining teams wield ice. The fire team can push into enemy bases and destroy their barrels while the others scramble to defend. When the hill changes, the battle for elemental control begins again. Be the last team that still has their barrels!

Single-Player Campaign

• Push through a branching web of handcrafted maps and modes as each juggernaut rider battles through their own path. Uncover new routes, unlock additional characters deeper in the campaign, and defeat powerful bosses to earn each character’s ending cutscene.

• From impactful driving and destruction to deep sound design and gritty atmosphere, Dark Engines is built to deliver the satisfying car combat your heart yearns for.
  

Lore:

When the spectral storms engulfed any man, woman, or child, there was a slashing of claws as wretched screams would ring out from the shroud, and then only thunder and silence... Seemingly without care or reason, these clouds began to haunt the once peaceful lands. The darkness would descend and move across the earth, leaving anything with breath in its lungs slashed to ribbons and emptied of life. Nothing was safe from the foul storms' ragged teeth. Over the years, it slowly began to strike more frequently and in larger form until not a single kingdom felt safe. A collection of high mages took much counsel together as they scrambled for answers until finally they discovered a supposed protection stone that could fend off this evil. Each high mage went to his respective kingdom with the news. Desperate for safety, the lords of the lands immediately sent expeditioners and anyone willing to search for the stone. Year after year, haunt after haunt, the world seemed to have fallen cold. Even when the sun shone, no one felt its warmth, as so many had lost loved ones to the spectral storms. People even began to walk towards the evil rather than run from it when it would descend, just to escape the hopelessness they felt. And so it was that one day a miner deep in the caverns landed on a giant glowing stone that fit the exact description of the protection stone. The stone was excavated and brought immediately to the king, and just as it arrived a giant spectral cloud descended upon the kingdom, but it turned out the high mages were right! The dark mist could not come down or through the city, as it had possession of the magical stone. The news of this traveled far and wide... only to bring about the era of the Zoe Wars.

Kingdoms battled kingdoms, taking possession of the stone for themselves only to lose it again to another. The wars raged on as the shroud kept gnashing its teeth and claiming the lives of horses, peasants, and kings alike. Until finally there came a day that Kings and Queens had come into power who had seen all the death and destruction from the ruthless battles over the protection stone and decided to take counsel together and end the wars once and for all. The peace treaty came on the terms that the giant protection stone, now known as the "Zoe Stone," must be divided equally among the kingdoms. In that way, they would all have smaller lands and kingdoms to rule, but they would all be protected. And so it was done. The Zoe Stone was split into large shards, one for each kingdom. For a good decade, the people were happy again. Families and towns were rebuilding. Methods of farming were invented to be close enough to the city's protection, and all seemed well. But as time went on, each time the spectral storm descended, it crawled a little closer to the Zoe Shards. Just a little more than it did the previous time. So the high mages studied the case and discovered the shards were slowly losing their power to protect. Perhaps from splitting the Zoe Stone in the first place. Perhaps from something else. Either way, all the kingdoms were once again in mortal danger. It was only a matter of time.

A very old and very wise mage sat and sent his mind through fragments of myths and legends that still lingered in the corners of his mind. Myths from before the shards. Even from before the Zoe Stone was discovered. Some of those stories told tales of an energy field or magic force that would glow as the spectral storms descended, and if you could reach the magic field in time, you would be safe within it. So the mage went swiftly to work and found a firsthand manuscript of a similar story in the castle's archives, and this particular account even held a location recorded of the event. To the mages delight the location was not far from the kingdom in which he lived. So the mage traveled out day after day and studied this peculiar magic field and, to make a long story short... over time he devised a way to harvest this magic and found that they could feed it into the Zoe Shard, thereby re-enhancing its power and ability to protect the kingdom. The news of this amazing achievement spread far and wide. The mages and scholars from different kingdoms began to design their own methods of tracking and harvesting these magic fields for themselves. Most of the fields would manifest very, very far from their respective kingdoms so caravans and troops would be sent to harvest the magic, but out in the plains, mountains, and forests, with no safety in reach, the soldiers were being slaughtered by the spectral storms. And horses were of no use since the shroud seemed to have a strange effect on them. They would panic and be uncontrollable whenever the evil descended, throwing their masters off and running in a fury in any direction, even sometimes casting themselves and their riders into the dark mist.

Many inventors were born out of this plight as they grew in knowledge of magic and machine. They developed what they called "juggernauts". They were war carts powered by magic and steam. The first ones were very light and fast and didn't carry any weapons. They could reach the magic fields, harvest them, and bring the energy home without any worry of being caught by the storms. But as each kingdom came upon this new machinery, the juggernauts began to run into each other as they were both heading to harvest the same magic fields. The juggernaut riders were always driven by a deep purpose to protect their kingdom, receive their reward, or something worse, and so they would clash and fight to the death. The juggernauts began to be built with weapons, powers, and armor to stand against other riders. Between the growing number of evil creatures, the other riders looking to harvest, and the spectral storm itself, the life of a Juggernaut Rider was mostly considered suicidal. But many a King and Queen alike would grant wishes and offer great rewards for anyone who would dare to brave a Juggernaut Mission for the kingdom. And only the righteous, desperate, or mad were willing to ride out into the fray. And so began the era of Dark Engines.