War on Wheels is a tactical turn-based game of post-apocalyptic vehicular combat – where the cars are controlled by physics. This is a reboot and modernization of our MMO ‘Darkwind’ which has been running since 2006. War on Wheels combines the best tactical car combat features that 20 years have taught us, in a singleplayer-first experience with all the graphics and physics improvements that a modern game engine can offer.
War on Wheels is influenced by tabletop games such as Car Wars and Gaslands, but brings all the benefits of computer-control: proper car and weapon physics; fast hassle-free play; an in-depth campaign. Influenced too by venerable videogames such as Interstate 76 and Autoduel. Car combat enthusiasts are overdue a modern videogame worthy of this legacy.
Turn based, physics controlled car combat
Turn-based physics is a rarely seen game mechanic, but with vehicular combat it really shines. Every turn of the wheel and press on the gas pedal has tactical impact on future game turns. Players have to consider their car's momentum, tire traction on the terrain surface, and the recoil of their guns. Our movement system uses a ‘ghost car’ showing where your driver thinks they will be after the next one second of physics-controlled movement – combining the effect of physics, their control choices, and their character’s driving skill.
The complex characteristics of the terrain – obstacles, topography, surface material – make physics controlled car dogfights far more nuanced as a tactical simulation than, say, aerial combat. The momentum and acceleration of the cars, and the physics effect of incoming weapons-fire and explosions makes physics-controlled car combat far more dynamic and nuanced, too, than tactical on-foot combat games. And because it's turn-based, you can control a whole squad of vehicles: muscle-cars, pickups, lorries, motorcycles... even pedestrians.
Singleplayer Campaign and Multiplayer Leagues
War on Wheels has a detailed singleplayer story-driven campaign (described below) and also has player-managed online multiplayer leagues. Set up your leagues, define the entry parameters and invite your friends to join. Destroy each other's cars and progress your characters and finances over the course of one or more league seasons.
Building On a Solid Legacy
War on Wheels, at its core, uses the same tactical combat system that was developed, tweaked and balanced in its predecessor over a 10+ year period, and which has kept players coming back for 20 years. (Yes, we have current players who have been playing Darkwind since 2006-7).
Vehicles
Numerous chassis types combined with many engine types, tire types and weapon types means you have huge build variations at your finger-tips - where you consider internal capacity, armor plating, weight, power and maneuverability while building out a squad of specialist vehicles in your gang's garage.
Weapons
Our combat system involves a range of vehicle-mounted and personal weapons: guns, rockets, melee rams, smokescreens, dropped mines and tire-shredding spikes. Each gun has a different firing rate, recoil physics, reloading difficulty, short-range and long-range accuracy, direct-damage and splash-damage - and each performs differently on hard and soft targets. We simulate vehicles on fire, accuracy from sustained rounds of shooting, and the accuracy effects of fast-moving targets on different weapons.
Characters
The most important parts of your gang are not its cars, but its personnel. Characters have a range of skills and abilities, including leadership and courage - which feed into a detailed in-combat psychology and morale system. Characters can gain a range of specialist skills as they level up, and can pick up 300+ different injuries and critical hits. And they can certainly die.
Game Setting
In 2025 the world burned. Not from anything made by man - but from catastrophic solar storms. We were blameless, and powerless. But from bunkers and caves, a few survivors emerged and forged a new world, a wasteland which came to be dominated by the biggest guns and the fastest cars.
Over some decades, a civilization of sorts rebuilt. Towns and fortresses traded and fought; farms became oases in the desert. Traders, pirates and militia battled in their heavily armed trucks and cars. Deathracing leagues became the new blood sport. Strange mutated creatures preyed on anyone foolish enough to be caught out in the sun-blasted wilderness.
Single-player Campaign: Place of Honor
In the year before the world ended, the Phoenix Base project aimed to save humanity's best and brightest, along with tools and materials and weapons they could use to remake a new world from the ashes. For the vast numbers who weren't rich or powerful or lucky enough to be invited within, a threat or a promise. A vast bunker complex, deep in some secret place, that would roll out and rebuild - or reconquer - the world as the old world's best saw fit.
After the world ended, as other bunkers opened up and people began to rebuild, they kept one eye out for the Phoenix Base, but the Phoenix never announced itself.
As years stretched into decades, the Phoenix Base receded further from memory in the press of more urgent needs, becoming the subject of idle speculation. As the generation that lived through the end of the world died off, the Base became legend, a thing of drunken musing and earnest market-square hustlers.
Seventy years after the end of the world, clues to the location of the Phoenix Base have been uncovered, and threaten to change the balance of power among city-states, merchant corporations, and nomadic herders. As the leader of a fledgling mercenary company, your decisions will shape the fates of many.
Go to our Community Hub to check out the 100 page fan fiction written by the Place of Honor lead writer!