Battle Racers is an upcoming real-time racing game, built on the Decentraland platform, which utilizes tokenized race cars. You collect off-chain parts and use them to assemble a car. You can then freely race on the practice tracks, but if you want to enter contests you need to tokenize your car. Once your car is tokenized it will gain experience and you can race for prizes.
Rather than trying to convince people to blindly invest, Altitude Games made a publicly available beta instance. Simply go to the link and you’ll be able to test the game out. You have access to six free sample cars or, if you purchased crates, you can assemble your own. This means that unlike many other crypto games, you can see how your NFTs will be put to use. It’s not a blind gamble on what they will deliver.
I am fairly confident that Battle Racers will be a solid game once officially released. If, after reading this post and checking out the demo, you want to get involved please use my referral link to participate in the Season one presale. Your parts will be immediately available for use or you could transfer them to opensea to sell. (I receive 10% of all purchases using my link)
For those who aren’t familiar, Decentraland is a first person perspective virtual world. You use standard WASD or the arrow keys to move and look using your mouse. The interface is clearly designed with virtual reality headsets in mind. While the beta itself is a standalone website, it has the same interface as it will once the game goes live on Decentraland.
The first thing you will see when you visit Battle Racers is a welcome message in front of a giant car. You may also see various robots wandering around, those are other players. Once the game is live in Decentraland you will instead see actual avatars.
If you take a closer look at the welcome sign, you will see what is currently available. You can race or you can use the garage to assemble your car. If no one else is around, you can play against AI, but its more fun against real people.
Entering through one of the wheels and looking around, you will see a couple garage signs as well as two tracks. While you can choose your car at the actual track, if you want to assemble it from parts that you own, you should use one of the garage interfaces. Simply click the gear to open the interface.
The garage is straight forward. On the left are the cars available to choose from and weapons are on the right. Cars have five stats, which will be calculated based on the parts used to assemble the car. The different stats are:
- DUR: Durability
- SPD: Speed
- POW: Power
- STR: Steering
- WGT: weight
You can see the six predefined cars below. All stats are subject to change.
You will also notice a seventh option, “Practice Car Setup”. This is where you can assemble a car from pieces that you own. Be advised, at the moment you cannot use parts which are accessible on opensea, you will need to wait until you can import them back in the game. There are lots of parts to choose from, you can see one of my cars below.
After choosing, or configuring your car, look to your right and select your equipment. You have two slots and eight items to choose from. You cannot use the same item twice. There were speed boosts, missiles, traps and shields. The chart below shows the different types.
Once you have found a loadout you are happy with, you are ready to race. I’m partial using a shield / boost combo, but everyone will develop their own strategies. The race instructions are nice and clear. You simply choose a spot, click play, select your loadout, and join.
Currently there are two tracks to choose from, a fairly simple one, and a track with two loops. Regardless of the track, I personally found that the 2P spot had the best view of the action.
Joining a race will bring you to an interface similar to the garage, only without the option to edit your custom car. Once you finalize your choices, there will be a 30 second countdown to allow other players to join before any empty slots will be filled with AI opponents. Finally there will be a stoplight countdown before the race begins!
Once the race begins, your car will drive itself. The only thing you have control of is when to use your abilities, and that is done by clicking the icons in the center of the screen. Once used you have to wait a specific amount of time, depending on the item, before you can use it again.
Simple yet fun. With luck victory will be yours!
That is a quick walkthrough of the Battle Racers Beta. I strongly suggest giving it a try yourself. The best source for information is Battle Racers Discord channel, but feel free to ask me questions as well.
See you on the race track!
I published an earlier version of this to the now defunct narrative.org blogging site in May 2019. I have since heavily updated it to reflect the latest beta release.
