Onrush aims to "keep you in the action all the time"

We recently saw Onrush at a preview event, a preview of which you can read right here, but last week we got the chance to talk with game director Paul Rustchynsky, and we asked what the motivation was with Onrush, as here it's not about being first but instead competing for different objectives within a giant mass of speeding vehicles.

"Well the one thing we really wanted to do with Onrush was to keep you in the action all the time," he explained. "We wanted to get away from this 'make one mistake in the first corner and that's your race over, you're done', so we introduced the Stampede system which is this idea of, fall behind the action or wreck, we just drop you back into the pack of 24 vehicles, and it really makes all the difference. It's that fun, cutting to the chase, and keeping that fun there all the time."

We also asked about where the idea originated from, to which Rustchynsky said:

"It was actually me, Jamie [Brayshaw], and a couple of the other directors sat down in the pub trying to think about 'what is this next racing game we're gonna make?' We knew we wanted to make a racing game - that's what we do really well - and we started looking at 'what racing games do we love?' It was those arcade classics - SSX, Burnout, Motorstorm - and it was like 'what are the best bits and what can we take from those games?' Also, 'what can we do to modernise the arcade racer?' There must be a reason why there aren't that many arcade racers or there aren't that many of them right now."

"So we thought 'let's infuse ideas from other genres. Let's take that fast round-to-round combat of fighting games, let's take the team-based structure of sports games and Overwatch and Rocket League, and infuse those ideas into this and offer something that's fresh and uplifting'."

Do you like Onrush's approach to the arcade racer genre?