Drive Beyond Horizons is a desert road-trip survival game where you build, tune, and drive your own junker across an open world. If you’ve played The Long Drive, you’ll recognise the pitch immediately.
I put 50+ hours into the Early Access build for this review. Fair warning: the second half of this Drive Beyond Horizons game review is about what comes next, because the developers have just announced a complete rebuild, and that matters more than anything I can say about the current version.
Keep an eye on the progress and update logs.How We Rate
The Car Building in Drive Beyond Horizons Is Genuinely Great
I’ll be upfront with you all, I didn’t have high hopes for this game. I’d already sunk time into The Long Drive, and I assumed this would be a clone with a fresh coat of paint, if that.
Then I started with the beat-up Lada, found and bolted a turbocharger onto it, and spent a whole evening tuning it for no reason other than curiosity with a big fat grin on my face.
That’s the hook, cars are the heart of this game, the 80s style and neon lean even more into it, and the customisation is the best thing about it. There are 19 cars to find and tinker with, and parts are interchangeable within reason.
You don’t need to be an automotive engineer to get started. Put a minivan engine into your Mustang lookalike and make it work, switch doors, hoods, lights, steering wheels, gear shifters, and make your own frankencar!
Even after 50 hours in-game, I still feel excited when a garage spawns in the distance because I know I’m going to find new parts to add to my rust bucket.
Drive Beyond Horizons’s Procedurally Generated Desert
The world is procedurally generated, but right now it consists of a single desert biome and a handful of attractions. That sounds fine for the first hour, and then you start noticing the infinite loop of the same garage, graveyard, motel, water tank, and gas station.
Points of interest recur constantly and I hit the “seen it” feeling far sooner than I’d like and after an hour or two. Driving across the sand is fun, but the destinations at the end of the road aren’t giving you enough reason to go.
That’s where you need to make up your own goals, maybe it’s finding all the parts for one car, or getting parts and sending them to your garage, finishing the simple quests currently inside, or just… existing!
Zombies in My Driving Game?
This is where the game genuinely confuses me to no end. You have a hunger, thirst, and pee bar to manage alongside your car’s fuel, engine oil, and coolant. The survival mechanics feel cookie-cutter at best. Hunger and thirst are tacked on, they’re meters that drain, and that’s about it.
Then there are the zombies, which feel completely out of place. I’m here for the open road, the engine noise, and the sunset over the dunes. Suddenly I’m fending off the undead, and they don’t even have the numbers to overwhelm me! You’d find one or two of them hoarding the loot across POIs, and you have an infinite rocket launcher to say hello.
And it’s not just the zombies. Guns, collectables, markets, poop jokes, serious moments, silly moments, driving sim, survival: it’s a mishmash. The game can’t decide what it wants to be yet, and that’s where this latest update comes in.
The Jank Is Real
Let’s talk about the jank, because there’s a lot of it. In my time with the game I ran into:
- Objects loading in late
- Texture pop-ins
- Items colliding and sinking through the floor
- Physics that occasionally decided to launch my car into orbit
None of this is a deal-breaker for an Early Access title, and the developers are open about it. But it’s worth knowing before you buy.
The Big News: A Complete Rebuild
The studio has decided to start the game again from scratch, and they’ve been surprisingly honest about why. In a development series called “Next Kilometer”, they explained that the current build has foundational problems that can’t be optimised away.
Here’s the short version of what’s wrong:
- The item system is built on heavy Blueprints rather than C++, which makes it far less performant than it should be.
- Interactions are hardcoded, which leads to duplicated work, oversights, and bugs that are hard to fix.
- The game runs on an early version of Unreal Engine 5 (5.2), with its own performance problems.
- Multiplayer multiplies the bugs and every single-player bug gets worse online.
- The terrain can’t support new biomes and there’s no way to transition between them without breaking other things.
In their own words, they could keep the car in the garage for months and stop everyone from driving it, or keep it on the road, shaking and rattling, while building a brand-new vehicle next to it.
They chose the second option, which is why you can still play the game today. Funnily enough, that’s exactly what The Long Drive promised before disappearing from common memory. Here’s what they’re planning, as I understand it:
- Unreal Engine 5.8+, with better performance, stability, and visuals
- Chaos Modular Vehicles replacing the current AVS plugin, for fewer random explosions
- New terrain tech targeting a stable 120 FPS, longer view distances, fixes for terrain holes, and better vegetation
- New biomes, finally possible thanks to biome transitions and combinations
- Road rework with winding roads, different road types, and multiple roads
- A redesigned save and item system that’s faster, lighter, and more reliable
- Modding support for vehicles, components, and points of interest
HonestlyThe save system takes a full minute to create a save file even on the latest SSDs, I’d be happy to see it completely reworked. Same goes for winding roads as driving in a straight line isn’t exactly fun after hour 10.
The Roadmap: Kilometer 80 and Kilometer 100
I like the way they’ve framed the journey. The first goal is Kilometer 80 (internally version 0.8), which aims to recreate the current game’s features on the new foundation, with a few key changes, particularly to the UX/UI. It will be released for free to everyone who already owns the game.
After that comes Kilometer 100, the full 1.0 release. They plan to use Early Access as a large-scale test, gathering feedback through Discord, BetaHub for bug reports, and their Steam, Reddit, and social channels.
RememberKilometer 80 is a like-for-like rebuild, not a content explosion. Don’t expect new biomes on day one. The real expansion comes on the road to 1.0.
All of these changes are fantastic, and a good call. The game is novel and fun as is, but far too limited to warrant a purchase. But here’s my one plea to the developers: take your time, and come at it with a defined version of the game.
Drive Beyond Horizons Steam: Wishlist It and Wait
So, is it time to get Drive Beyond Horizons on Steam? Not today. But I’d wishlist the game on Steam and keep an eye on the announcements, because these developers are definitely onto something.
Even in its current state, it’s a more realised version of The Long Drive that so many people loved. With a bigger team and a proper rebuild behind it, Drive Beyond Horizons could give its inspiration a serious run for its money.
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