Vidjama Gmaes Work

It isn’t fun at all.

Five Laps At Freddy’s is further proof of my theory that you can release literally anything into the wild and someone somewhere will lap it up as the greatest thing on God’s green Earth. In this case I suspect it’s mostly children well under the root beer drinking age who will pretty much clap and cheer at anything FNAF branded. And whom will take anything they can get for free because they’re children and won’t be getting any new games until Christmas.

But Five Laps at Freddy’s the demo is out and it is complete crap. It’s astounding to think that this is a real game with a real budget developed by a real studio, and not a fan game some tween is putting together in their spare time. I’d be far more impressed if it was a fan game because I think all budding amateur developers should be encouraged.

Where do we start? The controls in Five Laps are absolutely terrible. If you hold down the drift button for more than a split second the game will put you into a wall. Thankfully the game makes up for it by having the AI constantly get stuck on the map so you can get ahead without problems. Then again drifting is completely broken sometimes, and occasionally you’ll get respawned in a part of the map that gets you soft locked.

The game also explains virtually nothing, particularly the night shift mechanic. As you race the clock ticks and a few times over the five laps you’ll go into night shift and get chased down by a big animatronic that jump scares you. Usually this will take you from first to seventh in an instant. The endo bit is spoopy approximately once and after that it’s just annoying.

There is no explanation for night shift or the endo, or how to properly avoid it. I tried firing off weapons behind me and they didn’t work but I think I had a mirror on me in one map and it disappeared and might have gotten rid of the endo. I don’t know. There’s no explanation anywhere in-game and since the game just came out today no explanation anywhere on the internet on what the items do.

Also whoever decided to default map the accelerate button to the left trigger is probably the biggest clue you need that nobody involved in this game knows how to develop a racing game. That’s like booting up an indie FPS in 2024 and seeing that the dev mapped movement by default to the arrow keys.