Airframe Ultra is Wipeout crossed with Road Rash

 Two armed racers sit on their airframes.
Two armed racers sit on their airframes.

Podracing with a pipe wrench, Airframe Ultra is a game of hoverbike violence with a smeary, low-poly look reminiscent of the blurred textures of the PS1 era. Hey, who needs detailed models when you're only going to see them while speeding past as they explode into gibs?

Airframe Ultra is set in the world of Ultra Circuit racing, a future sport where players "from the cracked asphalt of San Juaro and the Ysidro edgelands to the hulking megacities of the Texicali ZEGO zone" compete on combat jetbikes called airframes. In the dystopian Southlands, first place in an underground death sport is apparently worth the extremely high risk of decapitation.

Tracks we'll be racing and dying on include "a neon sewer, a mummified mall, or the overgrown gardens of a high tech high rise", with pipes, chains, and guns among the weapons we'll be able to brutalize the other racers with.

It's an unusual next step for the Boston-based developer Videocult, which is most famous for Rain World, but I can definitely see myself committing acts of the old ultraviolence at top speed across what look like the streets of Silent Hill 1. Airframe Ultra will have splitscreen local multiplayer, and is available to wishlist on Steam.