There’s a particularly perverse pastime that makes up one of the cornerstones of Slingshot Racing. Drivers are pitted against the Chomper, a merciless racetrack-bound compacter on wheels that eats any vehicle unlucky enough to cross its path. The rules in Chomper races are simple: be the last car standing and you won’t be pulverized to a heap of twisted metal. Screw up on a turn or fail to hit a speed boost and you probably won’t be so lucky.
Maybe we’re supposed to see Slingshot Racing as a matchbox play land, as if we’re looking down on a Lilliputian diorama. Here we must physically activate the strange contraptions that make speeding cars whip around curves, tethered to bungee-like cords. But it’s much more fun to think of such physics-altering machines as great clanking contraptions in their own world, populated by real drivers being pit against this Mad Max-ish agricultural nightmare.
You can think of Slingshot as a top-down rally racer akin to Dirt, then, only instead of painstakingly approaching every dip and twist on the track with the utmost precision, you’re concerned with is how long to let the elastic band attached to your car stretch.
Then there’s the problem of knowing when to let the elastic band go for maximum power and the best turning radius, and most importantly, how your timing is going to affect its course. With no options for acceleration, braking or traditional turning, this pursuit is a necessity, and an intractably addicting challenge.