A hoverbike hurtler that always ends in a ragdoll brawl

It's Next Fest, so we're sampling as many demos as we can this week. You can download this one here.

If you don't win your race in hoverbike racing game Airframe Ultra, you might at least batter your opponent into submission with a steel pipe in the clunky physics brawl that takes place afterwards. This is, as the following GIFs will prove, a wrenchingly cool-looking racer of the much-dithered retro variety. You speed across the chunky trash textures and dangerously high bridges of a future city where all the coolest kids are into jet engine hooners and grievous bodily harm.

You pick up glowing piles of cash as you rush through narrow passages, storm drains, and busy motorways. Bash a boost button to get some extra oomph, but bash it too much and your airframe will explode. Even going too fast for too long will make your mechacycle overheat and splutter to a grinding halt. You can jab people as you pass them, like in ye olde racing game Motorstorm. Or in my case, you can be punched in the jaw just as you are feeling like the coolest racer in town.

That's fine, there'll be time for revenge. Between laps, you enter an arena and hop off your cyberscoot in a rush to spend all those dollar bills you collected while racing. Pickups are scattered randomly - armour, pistols, swords, baseball bats, chain whips, grenades, flashbangs, riot shields. Your character moves at a comically slow and clumsy pace, and sprinting quickly tires you out, so typically you grab the nearest thing you can afford and get to pummeling.

In moments of desperation, you may resort to fist fights. There is a punch and kick button and again that stamina bar that will quickly drain if you over-exert yourself. Winning a fight is easy. Watch this.

Okay, but next time I'll win.

This is the next game by the makers of Rain World, which in one sense feels surprising given it's a total departure from that tough ecological metroidvania. But in another sense there is something very familiar about the puppet-like movement of the character models - another case of procedural animation being harnessed to depict actions of terrible marionette violence.

But it's the hoverbike's controls that I find thumbily satisfying. In off-bike fights I was repeatedly floored and stabbed with a giant lance made out of a stop sign sharpened to a point. I only survived one or two brawls. But I found the swooshy hover drifting of the bike so sci-fi silky smooth that I don't care much. Except of course for all the times I drove straight into an oncoming car, or fishtailed into a lamp post, or slid helplessly off a bridge. That was less smooth.

There are a few flies on the visor, though. I'm not a fan of new laps beginning in a confined space where people still have the weapon they used in a previous round - this means you can be killed on the starting grid before a barrier even drops to let you race. The mix-up of ranged and melee weapons means that you are often bringing a knife to a gun fight, so some kind of limitation on the effectiveness of bullets might be in order. And there could definitely be a few more bike repair pickups dotted around each course.

Then again, these misgivings are an appeal for fairness, and it's very possible the makers are not out to make a fair world. These are the people who invented this thing, after all.