If you’ve never come across the oddly-named BeamNG.drive, there is probably one key fact you need to know about it: it started life as a soft-body physics sandbox, not a “game” in the traditional sense.
It’s a place where cars bend, buckle, shear and snap with unnerving realism that launched on PC 11 years ago and has remained in early access ever since - part tech demo, part obsessive toybox - where the sheer fidelity of its physics routinely devoured lesser GPUs for breakfast.
It’s also frequently the most played driving title on Steam, battling it out with heavyweights of the genre like Euro Truck Simulator 2 and Snowrunner, and even outpacing AAA games like Forza Horizon 6. Not bad for something that costs less than a a set of fake carbon-fibre mirror caps lets you gleefully spear a bus into a concrete wall because science.
And now it has made a surprise, but extremely welcome, transition to PlayStation 5. So how does it translate to the PS5? Surprisingly well - if you embrace its glorious rough edges.
The onboarding tutorial is new and genuinely helpful, because while BeamNG’s core concept is beautifully simple (“drive, crash, giggle”), what you can do inside it is sprawling. The menus are a maze of sliders, tabs, and toggles - a legacy of a PC-born interface that’s had to graft itself onto a controller.
On PS5, the devs have at least plastered the walls with signposts: frequent on-screen prompts tell you which button combos open which menus, and control mapping is fully customisable, including for steering wheels. It’s still the same messy brilliance underneath, though, and there’s a learning curve to how you wrangle the chaos.
Performance-wise, the miracle is that it works as well as it does.
BeamNG’s soft-body physics solve hundreds of real-time deformation calculations every time you nudge a guardrail, and a PS5 Pro keeps up admirably.
While BeamNG’s core concept is beautifully simple (“drive, crash, giggle”), what you can do inside it is sprawling.
Visually, you won’t mistake it for Gran Turismo - there’s some distracting level-of-detail popping, and the mirrors are so blurry they’re more philosophical suggestion than reflective device - but the graphics are perfectly acceptable considering the physics earthquake happening under the hood. And the framerate stays intact far more often than it has any right to when you’re cartwheeling a truck down an embankment.
Content remains on-brand BeamNG: no licensed cars, but plenty of finely sketched “inspired by” machines ranging from supercars to bubble cars, sedans, wagons, dump trucks, front-end loaders, buses and piles of props. User mods that add 'real' but unlicensed cars on PC aren't available on PS5 though, neither are the comically flailing fully-articulated crash test dummies.
Maps? There are a dozen sandbox spaces to spawn whatever you like, where you like, and do whatever ill-advised thing pops into your head. NPC traffic is limited on PS5 - with a maximum of four cars on screen at a time - which blunts some of the accidental carnage opportunities, but it’s enough to recreate the game’s signature “wrong lane, whoops” moments.
The PS5 version is also lacking anything in the way of online multiplayer, although it does have a split-screen couch co-op feature for local multiplay.
It’s also not without the sort of wrinkles PC early access veterans will shrug at. I had one hard crash of the game within a day of playing, menus can feel weirdly laggy, and button inputs occasionally register like they took the scenic route before deciding to work.
Whether you’ve got five minutes to snap a bus like a breadstick or five hours to tune, tweak, and attempt moonshot jumps, it’s relentlessly, stupidly fun.
You’ll also spend time digging through interface layers that never quite click into muscle memory. But here’s the thing: the moment you stop menu-diving and start driving, BeamNG.drive reminds you why it’s a phenomenon - few digital experiences deliver the pure, giddy cause-and-effect of physics as well as this.
Whether you’ve got five minutes to snap a bus like a breadstick or five hours to tune, tweak, and attempt moonshot jumps, it’s relentlessly, stupidly fun.
BeamNG.drive on PS5 is the console version of a cult PC obsession that, against the odds, hasn’t lost its soul. The interface is still a bit of a fever dream, the visuals make a few tactical compromises, and you will bump into bugs. But the physics - the reason you’re here - remain astonishing.
It’s raw, it’s rough, and it’s riotously entertaining. And the best part? At just NZ$35.95 it is ridiculously cheap. If you’ve ever watched a slow-motion crash test and thought “I’d like to do that, but with a bus with a JATO rocket strapped to it,” this is your happy place.
