Grip: Combat Racing was, for better or worse, little more than a remake of old PSX racer Rollcage. Developers Caged Element had crafted a nicer-looking if familiar game, retaining that same twitchy, aggressive mix of wall-riding racing, shooting rivals off the track while trying to maintain control during spins and crashes. Today, it’s a bit more than that. Today’s free update adds fifteen new “AirBlade” hover-vehicles with notably different handling, two new tracks plus some new music and skins. This is building on last month’s update adding four more tracks and new team play-modes. See the update trailer below.

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Time must> be warping as it’s 2018 and a new Rollcage game just launched. While not officially a sequel, Grip: Combat Racing by Caged Element is unmistakably kin to the cult PSX rough-and-tumble future racer, and out now. Featuring symmetrical armoured jet-cars that have no concept of ‘upside down’ and tracks that don’t particularly care much for gravity either, it’s a messy, scrappy combat racer closer to Mario Kart than Wipeout. It’s been in early access since 2016, but today it speeds past the finish line. 90s drum & bass awaits in the trailer below.

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I’ve never been much for real-world racing games. They all just feel so mundane compared to the alternatives that videogames present, like thundering along at a thousand miles per hour in F-Zero, thumping over an impossible rollercoaster track in Wipeout or bouncing wildly off the walls in underrated PSX future-racer Rollcage. Grip has been in early access for ages now, and is functionally identical to Rollcage, but with a shiny modern coat of paint. It’s already solid fun, and the final cut is now due this autumn to be published by new outfit Wired Productions.

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Online multiplayer has arrived in Grip [official site] with the Rollcage-inspired racer’s latest patch pitstop on its journey through early access. Our boy Brendy Prematurely Evaluated Grip almost a year ago and was already quite exited by the future prospects of tumbling double-sided cars and futureraces. This here addition is a big step towards the full release, so that’s grand. Here, watch these cars go fast: … [visit site to read more]

Premature Evaluation is a weekly dive into the world of early access games, which Brendan has now permanently seized from the Rob Zacny in a bloodless coup. Thanks Rob! This week, he goes speeding through the future world of combat racer GRIP, frequently upside down.>

GRIP is the spiritual successor to Rollcage – but also to those remote-controlled cars that were massive in the nineties, and which could not climb the ceiling no matter how hard you believed. If you haven’t heard of Rollcage, I wouldn’t be surprised. It is the forgotten son of the futuristic racer era of the late 90s and early 00s, overshadowed by its older brother, Wipeout. And who could be surprised? Wipeout had the Chemical Brothers, it had techno and ecstasy, it had that one scene in Hackers. What did Rollcage have? A set of toys that routinely malfunctioned after three weeks.

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Grip [official site], a Rollcage spiritual successor made by a team including two of the original game’s developers, has entered Early Access. The initial launch only includes a single vehicle but there are seven levels and three game modes. You can also play against AI or splitscreen multiplayer. I am quite excited about this because Rollcage is one of my favourite racing games. If you’ve never played it, absorb the video below to understand why I love it so.

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