BeamNG.drive has spent over a decade as the PC crowd’s favourite way to turn a plethora of vehicles into what can be best described as a bunch of crumpled accordions. Its soft-body physics are the main selling point of the game, and it gained a lot of hype in its early days for just how real, and in turn, unreal the situations and ways you could make vehicles collide. Now BeamNG.drive has finally made the jump to consoles, and you’d expect that to be a cause for celebration. For the most part, though, it’s a cause for a long, tired sigh.
Firstly, the console port took so long; BeamNG.drive came out in early access back in 2015, and it’s had a long time to grow and shift into what it turned into. Take the most elaborate vehicle destruction sandbox ever made, put it in the hands of people who have never wanted to wrestle with a mod folder, and let them go to town.
But BeamNG has spent the years since its launch growing from a simple crash simulator into something that wants to be a complete automotive playground, with career modes, scenarios, challenges, a map editor, and a menu structure that appears to have been designed by someone who hates the very idea of being found. That evolution was always going to be a tricky thing to squeeze onto a controller, and the console version of BeamNG.drive collapses under the weight of its own ambition.
Let’s start with the controls, because they’re the first thing you’ll curse. On PC, BeamNG is played with a keyboard, a mouse, and ideally a wheel, and the game demands an enormous number of inputs to do everything it wants to let you do. Lights, indicators, hazards, gear selection, parking brake, camera controls, vehicle-specific functions, the spawning and deleting of objects, the pausing and slowing of time.
Now try squeezing all of that onto a gamepad that has about a dozen buttons, two sticks, and a D-pad. The result is a control scheme that forces you into the kind of grip I didn’t know was possible. I was constantly holding one button to modify another, pressing the sticks, fiddling with other buttons, contorting my fingers in ways the controller’s designers never intended. A few minutes in, my hands were cramping, and I was not having any fun.
And even after all that contortion, there are things you simply can’t do. That’s not an exaggeration, and it’s the most damning thing I can say about the console port. There are functions in this game that exist, that are visible in the menus, that you can read about in the tutorial, and that you can’t actually perform because there just aren’t enough buttons to go around.
“… the console version of BeamNG.drive collapses under the weight of its own ambition.”
Features that feel like fundamental parts of the experience are either buried so deep they might as well be gone or are missing entirely. When a game’s whole appeal is the freedom to do whatever you want, being told “well, not that” by your own controller is a pretty bad feeling. That is, unless you want to sacrifice some other feature from a button combo to replace a new one.
The real stickler here is the menu system, which is a nightmare experience in itself. The game’s interface was always a bit of a maze on PC, but with a mouse you could at least cut through it quickly. On a controller, it becomes a slog of tiny icons, nested menus, and options where the purpose isn’t clear until I had already selected them, and usually when it’s something like gravity or speed the game will unpause itself to set the new options, and that takes the entire fun out of setting up pure chaos crashes or interesting ramps if you have to fight through the menu to get back into the game to take part in the fun.
I even gave BeamNG.drive the benefit of the doubt and went through the tutorial twice, thinking and hoping the second pass would make things click, or maybe I had missed something and I came out the other side only marginally less confused, but still incredibly frustrated.
The UI is also a tiny-text and unexplained-meaning jumble. Information is crammed on screen in a way that suggests no one stepped back to ask whether a person sitting on a couch ten feet from their TV could actually read it. Text is small, icons are cryptic, and the layout of options seems to change depending on what mode you’re in, so muscle memory is next to useless.
“I kept coming back to the feeling that BeamNG.drive is a game that has outgrown its own origins and hasn’t been properly rebuilt to handle them.”
Even basic things, like figuring out how to switch vehicles or change the time of day, can turn into an expedition. I never once felt like I had a handle on where I was in the menus, and that sense of being lost is a pretty miserable way to spend your time with a game that’s supposed to be about fun and freedom.
Part of the beauty of BeamNG.drive is wanting to try something, see it go horribly wrong, and immediately try again. When every attempt is separated by long load times, and quite a bit of jitter when you are loading vehicles in that loop of curiosity and consequence is badly broken. It turns what should be a quick giggle into a test of patience.
Which is a real shame, because when BeamNG.drive works, it still works. There’s a magic to the moment where you take a car you have no business driving up a hill you have no business driving up, and the physics just do their thing. Suspension flexes, panels crumple, wheels bend and shear off, and you sit there watching in genuine awe as the game calculates all that damage in real time.
It’s still the best vehicle destruction in any game, and nothing on console even comes close. If you treat this version as a sandbox for causing chaos, as a test drive into seeing what weird, wonderful things you can do with a handful of cars and a ramp, it can still deliver a good time. Launching a van off a cliff and watching it tumble is as satisfying here as it ever was.
The trouble is that’s about all it’s good for in this form. The more you try to do, the more the cracks show. The career and scenario modes that give the PC version its depth feel hampered by the control limitations and the unwieldy interface. The sense of progression and purpose that the game has been working towards gets lost when you’re fighting the menus just to start a mission.
I kept coming back to the feeling that BeamNG.drive is a game that has outgrown its own origins and hasn’t been properly rebuilt to handle them. It wants to be a sprawling automotive world, but it’s still thinking like a niche crash simulator, and the console port exposes the gap between those two ideas.
I really wanted to like this more, because I remember playing around a bunch in BeamNG.drive back in 2020 and having a blast just messing around with the physics. I have a lot of affection for what BeamNG.drive is trying to do, and I admire the ambition of bringing it to a new audience. But a great simulation doesn’t excuse a clunky experience, and the console version is clunky in just about every way that matters.
Not to mention the career mode that ties around you buying cars and driving around with insurance, hoping not to crash when this game wants you to do exactly that; it feels like the game has lost sight of what made it fun and interesting in the first place. The bottom line is if you’re hoping for the full BeamNG.drive experience on your console, you should check something else out because this isn’t it. This is one of those cases of the game doing too much and poorly implementing it for the people who are playing on a controller.
