BeamNG.drive on PS5 Review: Is it coming to consoles too late?

2026-10-28 12:33, by Chris

Back in 2015, developer BeamNG released its racing game BeamNG.drive on Steam. Initially developed using CryEngine 3 before moving to the Torque engine, BeamNG.drive was marketed as a real-time driving simulation with one main objective: drive as many vehicles as possible and wreck them in the process.

At its core, BeamNG.drive features a soft-body physics engine that handles everything from vehicle dynamics to collisions between objects and vehicles. The result is an experience that delivers remarkably realistic driving physics, crashes and vehicle damage, with an impressive level of detail and accuracy.

It didn't take long for the game to make waves across social media, largely thanks to its incredibly realistic physics. Before long, the modding community stepped in, expanding the experience with a wealth of additional content, including new maps, licensed vehicles, fresh game modes and much more.

More than ten years after its original release, BeamNG has finally announced a PS5 version of its hit driving simulator. Released on October 19, BeamNG.drive has at last made its way to consoles, opening the door to an even wider audience. But has the studio missed its window of opportunity? Has the console release come too late, especially when compared to the PC version? Let's take a closer look!

Plenty of content

More than ten years after its original PC release, we were naturally expecting a fairly substantial amount of content, and for the most part, BeamNG.drive delivers. That said, several features are still missing and are expected to arrive over the coming weeks. The main attraction is Career Mode, which serves as the primary way to experience the game's incredibly realistic driving simulation.

Throughout this mode, the game teaches you the ins and outs of vehicle handling, but there's very little room for error. Crash your vehicle, and you'll need to have it towed to a garage. Most challenges leave virtually no room for mistakes, either. The game can be surprisingly demanding and, at times, downright frustrating.

Career Mode is split into several categories, including competitive events. You'll take part in races, time trials, drift challenges and drag races, earning stars to unlock additional events as you progress. There are also plenty of varied mini-games, featuring police chases, precision-driving challenges that require you to navigate slaloms and park your vehicle correctly, as well as obstacle courses packed with tricky hazards.

Career Mode also lets you take on delivery jobs, ranging from transporting small pieces of furniture as part of a house move to hauling cargo with heavy-duty trucks and semi-trailers. There's a decent amount of variety here, and the mode feels fairly comprehensive overall. However, the challenges do tend to recycle the same objectives, which can quickly make the experience feel repetitive.

Beyond Career Mode, BeamNG.drive offers several other ways to play. Rally Mode allows you to tackle individual stages or even compete in a full rally, complete with all the challenges and demands that come with it. There's also local multiplayer and a more laid-back Free Roam mode, where you're free to experiment and do pretty much whatever you want. Here, you can repair your vehicle whenever you like and, more importantly, switch to a different one at any time.

Despite all this content, it's difficult to find a compelling reason to keep coming back. On PC, BeamNG.drive has grown into something much bigger thanks to its incredibly active modding community. Unfortunately, that's not the case on PS5. What we're left with is a game that's great fun during those first few minutes but quickly becomes repetitive, with little sense of progression or long-term appeal. Before long, you're simply doing the same things over and over again.

Bugs, lots of bugs

This growing sense of repetition, combined with the feeling that there's no real purpose to what you're doing, is made even worse by a host of technical issues and shortcomings that do the game no favours whatsoever.

Let's be clear: BeamNG.drive is far from technically polished, and it's plagued by a wide range of bugs. The GPS works about half the time, while the menus feel sluggish and suffer from noticeable input lag. On several occasions, the activity you've selected simply won't launch through the GPS, forcing you to select it all over again. The game's interface is also far from intuitive and doesn't feel properly optimised for PS5.

The problems don't stop there. Once you're behind the wheel, you'll encounter plenty of glitches, ranging from collision detection issues and objects randomly appearing or disappearing to visual glitches, frame-rate drops and blurry textures that fall well short of what you'd expect from a PS5 game. Needless to say, this is far from the ideal experience.

The more hours you play, the less fun it is

Ultimately, it doesn't take long for BeamNG.drive to start feeling stale, and the initial excitement quickly fades. Career Mode certainly offers plenty of challenges, but they all revolve around largely the same objectives. The game naturally puts all its eggs in one basket, relying on its physics engine and incredibly detailed damage modelling. However, there are moments when it feels as though the sim takes things too far, making the outcome unpredictable and downright frustrating.

Take a corner a little too fast, accelerate slightly too aggressively down a straight, or get just a bit too close to a kerb, and you could find your bumper or even a tyre completely torn apart. Just like that, your race or challenge is over. Damage can sometimes feel so exaggerated that it actually undermines the realism the game is trying to achieve. Vehicles can end up feeling as though they're made of paper, with even the slightest contact resulting in catastrophic damage.

As a result, the fun and hilarious moments that make such a strong first impression quickly give way to frustration. You'll find yourself restarting challenges simply because the damage system has punished you for what feels like a minor mistake. Add that to the numerous bugs and repetitive gameplay, and it won't be long before you've had enough.

The visuals don't do much to improve matters, either. To be fair, BeamNG.drive isn't an ugly game by any means, but it's certainly nowhere near the most impressive-looking title of this console generation. Ultimately, the game feels decidedly average across the board. Unfortunately, the countless spectacular crash compilations and modded gameplay videos circulating on social media have also set expectations that this PS5 version simply cannot live up to.

In the end, perhaps BeamNG.drive has come on consoles a little too late. It was never going to compete with the virtually limitless possibilities of the PC version, but the overall quality of this port leaves plenty to be desired. It's clear that the transition to console hasn't been handled particularly well.

Just like on PC, vehicle controls are impressively detailed, allowing you to operate everything from headlights to turn signals and much more. However, accessing these features requires navigating a series of submenus that are far from controller-friendly. As a result, many of these options are simply too cumbersome to use and end up being largely ignored during gameplay.

Tested on PS5. See our rating policy here.

6/10

After a long wait by console gamers, BeamNG Drive is finally here, more than a decade after its PC release. Unfortunately, the game may have been released too late. Without mods and all the unofficial game modes, this version struggles to impress and offers very little of interest. What we end up with is a game that seems fun at first, but quickly becomes monotonous, repetitive, and frustrating, with technical performance that clearly falls short. The game is riddled with bugs, the UI i’s far from polished, it all suffers from slowdowns, and the content on display fails to win us over.

Once the first few minutes are over and the initial crashes are done, the magic wears off, and you plow through the challenges with less and less enjoyment and more and more frustration. Too bad.

• + Truly realistic damage simulations
• + Pretty cool physics
• + The rally mode is a lot of fun
• + Great amount of fairly varied content

• - Way too many bugs, both in-game and in the menus
• - FPS drops
• - The UI is really not up to par
• - Becomes repetitive very quickly
• - Physics and damage handling is sometimes random and quite frustrating
• - It’s hard to find any real appeal in the game
• - The console port leaves a lot to be desired

• PlayStation 5