10 Games With The BEST Vehicular Combat
10 Games With The Best Vehicular Combat
Welcome to MojoPlays, and today we’ll be taking a look at games that have nailed the art of making vehicles go kaboom!
"Jak X: Combat Racing" (2005)
Naughty Dog took a platforming hero and strapped rockets to his ride, then told him to make a break for the finish line. Jak X blends arcadey speed with brawler energy, letting you swap front and rear weapons, fire guided shots, drop mines, and boost with eco pick ups across multiple races. Adventure mode has Jak racing for his life while trying to cure himself of a deadly poison. While Exhibition mode features your typical death races and time attacks. It’s loud, crunchy, and surprisingly strategic once you learn when to slam and when to sprint. The result is a PlayStation 2 era chaos machine that still delivers rowdy, skill based scraps.
"Crash Team Racing" (1999)
The classic that taught a generation to drift, Crash’s transition to the kart racer genre was damn near flawless. Crash Team Racing uses question mark crates to dole out weapons and boosts, and collecting ten Wumpa Fruit juices them for bigger booms and sturdier shields. Masks grant brief invincibility and speed, while beakers, bombs, and a nasty clock keep racers on the edge of their seats. Battle arenas and bosses in the adventure mode make it more than a simple kart clone. If you grew up arguing over Polar Pass, you also grew up learning item control and slipstream discipline the fun way.
"Burnout: Revenge" (2005)
Why just burn rubber when you can literally set fire to the streets? Revenge not only lets you outrace other cars, but punt them like they’re bowling pins, then chain takedowns while your boost bar screams for mercy. New Traffic Attack events, vertical takedowns from jumps, and a tweaked Crash mode turn dangerous driving into a style based score chase. It all happens at a ferocious pace, with metal folding like paper and every corner daring you to nudge a rival off the road to their doom. It’s gleeful wreckage all round.
"War Thunder" (2012)
If you want vehicular combat that takes itself seriously, this is your playground. War Thunder puts aircraft, tanks, and warships in one ecosystem with realistic damage modeling, historically grounded vehicles, and battle styles from arcade to full simulation. Joust with a Dicker Max before raining hell with aLincoln B Mk II. The grind is real, but the variety is unmatched and the cross platform player base keeps matches full. Few games sell the weight of steel and the fear of the open sky this well.
"Battlefield 1" (2016)
Taking Battlefield back to the first world war was one of DICE’s best decisions to date. Swapping modern tech for the novelty of classic warfare, Battlefield 1 is a combined arms sandbox where tanks, biplanes, cavalry, and field guns trade momentum across huge maps. The real showstoppers are piloting behemoths like the armored train, the dreadnought, and the towering airship that can tilt a fight when crewed well. The franchise may have finally returned to its roots, but this little experiment turned out to be an absolute blast.
"Super Mario Kart - Battle Mode" (1992)
Before online shouting matches, there were living room duels. Battle Mode distills Mario Kart to pure mind games on tight arenas, where each hit pops a balloon and three pops end your run. Feather hops, shells, banana placements, and timing decide everything, and that elegant loop began here on the Super Nintendo. It proves vehicular combat does not need damage models when the rules are simple and the items are spicy. Few sounds hit like a red shell homing in while your last balloon wobbles in the corner of the screen.
"Blur" (2010)
What if Mario Kart put on a leather jacket and stole a sports car?. Blur mashes licensed rides and city courses with arcade handling and a color coded powerup set that turns races into tactical brawls. Shunt, shock and barge your way to first place, swap your pickups at will, and conquer the course with tactics as well as horse power. Online races supported up to twenty players, keeping elbows out and egos bruised, while career events layered in spicy challenges. It was dangerously ahead of its time and remains a cult favorite.
"Mad Max" (2015)
Welcome to the wasteland, where ruins of the old world are yours to workshop. Mad Max makes car combat the core loop, letting you ram, board, and ignite enemies while perpetually increasing the durability and fire power of your lone vehicle. The shotgun punctuates finishes, the harpoon rips wheels, while your grease monkey scrambles over the hood to fix your ride mid pursuit. Missions and territory control exist purely for you to decimate raiders in a storm of dust and fire. When a convoy shatters in slow motion, it feels earned.
"Wreckfest" (2018)
Blending together demolition derbies and scrappy circuit races, Wreckfest walks the oil-covered line between realistic destruction and crazy arcade fun. Swiftly becoming a fan favorite with steady support and a devoted community, if you’re all about seeing spectacular pileups that indulge in accurate physics and tons of cosmetic damage, few do it better than this overlooked fireball, where you’re always one bad turn away from becoming scrap metal.
"Twisted Metal: Black" (2001)
One of the fiercest sandboxes ever made, born and bred for vehicular slaughter, Twisted Metal: Black throws a cast of broken souls into death matches hosted by the pseudo devil, with cars that carry every weapon imaginable. This is the game that made Sweet Tooth a household name, and he’s only one part of its web of narratives, all of which were pretty outstanding for the time. The tone is grim, the speed is feral, and split screen brawls are still legendary. It set the benchmark by making every arena a puzzle of ambush and power pickups that reward aggression and craft in equal measure.
Which one of these games really made you put the pedal to the metal? Be sure to let us know in the comments!