Brendan Caldwell - Jank (Page 3)

27 Feb 2026 By Brendan Caldwell Bits

A hoverbike hurtler that always ends in a ragdoll brawl

On your bike, mate

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.

A GIF of a racer in hot pink flying out of a narrow tunnel and coming to a halt against a backdrop of a sci-fi megacity. — Ah, London.

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.

The player lands after a big jump and is struck by an opponent who catches up from behind. — Furious.

That's fine, there'll be time

26 Feb 2026 By Brendan Caldwell Bits

Ready to die hot and confused? Here's a hardcore orbital warfare sim

Let them cook (their enemies)

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

Some interstellar navies run out of fuel in the middle of a space battle. I ran out of fuel 51 days before the battle even began. In Spacefleet: Heat Death you are given a map of solar system (well, just the Earth and the moon) and asked to hop from station to station, Lagrange point to Lagrange point, building up a fierce little gang of spacekillers so that you can survive an incoming bunch of baduns. The trouble: it is all presented like you are sitting at a computer workstation in NASA and if you don't know what Delta-V is from years of Kerbal Space Program you may as well put a giant laser to your head right now.

This is a strategy game rooted in hard sci-fi. It's the 23rd century and the Earth is swarmed by filthy spacetrash. You can buy ships and arrange them into fleets to fight or trade with many dirtbag factions - there are missile frigates, laser wielding corvettes, artillery bastards, fuel tankers, cargo haulers. They all look sort of the same, but each

23 Feb 2026 By Brendan Caldwell Feature

What is your fondest memory of jank? 14 game devs tell us

A celebration of unintentional comedy in games

Jank, the website, is one month old. That's old enough to cry for attention. Which is what we've done. We gave this PC games blog its name out of fondness for broken but ambitious games. Jank is often the byproduct of game designers trying to bulldoze their way through realistic expectations. There are borked games and then there are borked games that exude raw zeal through ragdolling corpses or flying animals. When a game reaches for the sky, it sometimes turns the skybox inside out.

We aren't the only ones with fond memories of jank in videogames. To celebrate our scrappy website's continued existence, we emailed a bunch of game developers and asked them a simple question: "What is your favourite memory of jank in a game?" Here's what they said.

A vault dweller runs across the wasteland, passing a red building. — You can't walk the dog if you use fast travel.

Brendon Chung, Blendo Games

(Lead designer of Skin Deep, Quadrilateral Cowboy)

"During my playthrough of Fallout 4, the fast travel system stopped working. This meant my only mode of traversal was: walking. To get anywhere, I had to hoof it. And it was great?

"I became crazy stingy about how much stuff I was lugging around. Embarking

20 Feb 2026 By Brendan Caldwell News

The best Zachlike is getting a big surprise expansion

And it's half as long as the original

Nine years after stoically engineering one of the finest puzzle games known to humanity, the creators of Opus Magnum have decided to release a chunky prequel expansion that is "around half the length of the original". God, I needed this. For anyone who fondly remembers posting GIF after GIF of their clicky-clacky solutions in the original alchemical braintickler, it is good news. Good enough to break our usual cynical binning of press releases here at Jank, and relay some of the details.

It's called Opus Magnum: De Re Metallica, and let me pause here to say it is a terrible idea to tempt fate by invoking the name of a famously litigious rock band, but never mind. We'll soon have more clonky puzzles with swivelly mechano arms.

It's going to have it's own prequel story, about a "maverick alchemical researcher" who is inventing reckless stuff which'll see him "clash with established orthodoxy, bicker with his assistant, and attract attention from the Great Houses." I enjoy the stories of these games but I imagine a lot of folks only care about cold hard facts. So know that there are three new "glyphs". Three fresh chapters of puzzles. And a difficulty level

18 Feb 2026 By Brendan Caldwell Bits

I will break EVE Online's stupid AI chatbot

It literally cannot count

Some of you who've had to interact with customer service chatbots will doubtless know the joy of bullying them until you force a human to reveal themselves and usher the idiot robot away. I am the kind of sicko who loves to pick on machines. I will absolutely build a brick enclosure around delivery bots. My partner once had a vacuum bot and I would hoot with laughter every time I nudged it just so, causing it to get trapped under the sofa and say, in its sad sad robot voice: "wHeELs aRe StuCK". I just cannot help it. Many machines are morons and deserve to be mocked.

Eve Online just added an AI chatbot to "help" beginner players navigate its famously complex, intimidating and brutal MMO universe of hideous skulduggery. I am determined to break its spirit.

To give you some context, the makers of the ancient and endlessly write-about-able spaceship spreadsheet game have - as is their habit - been slurping on the hot gunge of the tech billionaire class, this time in the form of generative AI hype. While previous binges have resulted in a blockchain spinoff with crypto horse manure, this time they've focused on

16 Feb 2026 By Brendan Caldwell Feature

Swansea from Mouthwashing is the best alcoholic in games

This is the bad kind of drinking contest

Apologies to all fans of Harry from Disco Elysium, but the best alcoholic in all of videogames is a hamburger-gutted spaceship engineer who spends most of his time looking simply furious. Swansea is the low-poly blue collar spaceship mechanic in sci-fi horror game Mouthwashing. He is drunk for most of the game and even becomes - at one point - a mortal threat to your life.

Yet as all other male members of the ship's crew flail around during disaster with denial, paralysis or naivety, Swansea attains a form of grim enlightenment. He is darkly honest about himself at the very end. It's the cold honesty of his alcoholism that makes him stand out among the crew.

If you don't know Mouthwashing, consider those opening paragraphs my recommendation to go play it. It's one of Jank's best games of the decade for a good reason. It takes two or three hours to play and another two or three weeks to stop thinking about. Longer, clearly, if you're an underemployed games journalist. Spoilers ahead, et cetera.

Let's sum it up for anyone who needs a reminder. You're a crew making a delivery across space. The captain, for unknown reasons, appears

13 Feb 2026 By Brendan Caldwell Feature

Finally, a car mechanic sim where your mates do all the work

Jonty and Brendy "team up" in Car Service Together

"There's nothing WRONG with the brakes on this thing, you fucker!"

I raise a car on the pneumatic lift and ignore Jonty's angry outbursts from across the garage. He has been working on that ancient red banger for a while now, swearing to himself the whole time. I raise my own four-wheeled task a little higher on the lift, pop off the oil cap and drain all the dark car bile into a funnel. Simple. Car Service Together is a good old-fashioned early access co-op jankfest, and even better when you have a car-obsessed friend to do all the hard jobs.

"This customer is getting charged 200 bucks for wasting my time," mutters Jonty.

I patiently change an oil filter.

"It's absolute bullshit that you have to take the spacer and the caliper out to change brake pads."

A red car awaits service on the floor of the garage as Jonty's character inspects a button. — Jonty knows his wipers from his windscreens - a real professional.

I lower the car on my lift and fill it up with new oil. My job is done. I saunter over to Jonty, who's still struggling with the rusty bolts on the wreck in front of him. If there was a button in Car Service Together that let me arrogantly wipe

11 Feb 2026 By Brendan Caldwell Feature

Is Overwatch actually worth playing again?

Someone's been huffing the hype balloons

Last week a blitz of articles asserted that live servicey shooter Overwatch 2 was making a comeback, a conclusion that presumes the hero blaster had ever "gone" anywhere in the first place. PC Gamer called it a long-in-the-works "glow-up", a fairer assessment than Kotaku's grandiose statement: "While you weren't looking, Overwatch put its crown back on". Neither article examined the hero shooter and how it plays today from the position of a long-lost player, instead providing a summary of changes and dramas over the years. The recent influx of press has more to do with a PR push developers Blizzard have been making to bring attention to an (admittedly large) update that adds five new heroes in one day. The silliest part of this update is the decision to rebrand Overwatch 2 to simply Overwatch, a walking back of the sequel's grand intentions so clownish that it resulted in some more fun headlines.

So, the natural question arises: is Overwatch actually good again? Was it ever even "bad"? Maybe if someone - I dunno - replayed it and wrote about it, we can find out. So let's do that.

For context, I loved Overwatch but stopped playing in 2018