Slay the Tire

The highway is the dungeon. Every run is a ride down the world's great roads: pick your road on the map, pull in at gas stations and motels, stop for whatever is happening by the roadside, and fight what comes up behind you, turn by turn, at seventy miles an hour.

Four riders, four ways to fight.

• Hank "Morningstar" Maddox, a scarred brawler on a heavy chopper with a spiked flail on a long chain. Rides right up alongside, hits hard, hits often, and bleeds for it.
  
• Vex Reyes, a road outlaw on a fast sportbike. Pulls ahead, drops spikes, never runs out of knives.
  
• Marisol "Sparks" Vega, a junkyard genius on a cafe racer bristling with bolted-on coils, coolant tanks, flamethrowers and nitro.
  
• Mortimer "Ferryman" Barrow, a skeleton in black robes on a long black chopper. Whatever he summons out of the graves along the highway rides with him: Skeleton Riders, Ghoul Lords and Lich Kings.

Bonus rider (DLC): Walt Boone, a weathered bounty hunter with a shotgun and his blue heeler, Jesse, riding in the sidecar. Every face on the highway has a price.

Twenty-two acts, and never the same trip twice. At the end of every act the road forks, two ways at first and five by the last, and the roads you pass up are gone: Monument Valley or the Louisiana bayou; the Mojave's Route 66, the Extraterrestrial Highway or a ledge road round a lone mountain; Los Angeles after dark, the Pharaoh's Road past the pyramids, Alaska's haul road, Iceland's Ring Road, the islands of the wine-dark sea; Japan's Tokaido under the cherry blossom, the Great North Road through the castles and the Highlands, a mall the size of a county, a fog-bound town where the siren sounds, a city in black and white. The last act is always the Dream, where the dunes are bowling balls and the highway tips down at forty degrees into a kingdom under the earth; and past it, for those who carry the right thing, a secret city of lead and gold.

Through it, not just past it. The road goes underground and indoors: through a slot canyon where the sun comes down in beams, a lava tube, a sea cave full of sea lions, a casino floor, an endless car wash, a sugar mill at grinding time, Hangar 18, the waiting room of Union Station, wine caves, mountain tunnels and a crystal cavern.

What's in the game:

• 4 playable riders, each with their own deck, starting gas can and way of playing
  
• 22 acts (one of them a secret) and their 69 bosses
  
• 344 cards, 204 gas cans (the relics of the road: oil, nitro, spare keys and stranger things)
  
• 587 enemies in 567 encounters: bikers, pickups, semis, police cruisers, monster trucks, alligators, a parade dragon, a mothership, the crocodile-headed Devourer of the Dead, Morag the worm of Loch Morar, and bosses at the end of every act
  
• 513 roadside events
  
• The Wanted ladder: ten levels of heat for every rider, for the runs after your first win
  
• A director that shoots every fight like a road movie, under skies that change with the hour and the weather
  
• 71 Steam achievements, Steam Cloud saves, and a Steam Deck preset of its own
  
• Full controller support (Xbox, PlayStation, Nintendo and Steam Deck button prompts), as well as mouse and keyboard
  
• 14 languages: English, Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Russian, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, German, Japanese, French, Polish, Korean, Turkish, Ukrainian, Italian
  
• Play it in VR with any OpenXR headset (SteamVR, Meta Quest over Link or Air Link, Virtual Desktop), seated, with a gamepad
  
• Side-by-side (SBS) 3D output for 3D TVs and AR glasses