I’m calling this a mini review because I’ve only spent a couple of hours with Make Way so far, so it doesn’t feel fair calling it a full review. But things are so busy at the moment that I might not have the time to do a full playthrough in the near future, and I am keen to tell you about this game – because it’s rather special.

I didn’t end up getting around to doing a write-up of my favourite games from EGX this year – as I said, I’ve been very busy recently – but Make Way was easily my standout game from the October show, and my experiences with it since it came out at the start of December have confirmed that it’s really rather good indeed.

The concept is simple: think of the classic racer Micro Machines, but where you build the track as you go. Up to four players compete either online or in local multiplayer, and at the start of the race, you all grab a piece of track and scramble to connect them up. Then you race on the track you’ve just created and wait for the points to be totted up, before choosing more pieces to extend the track even further, and race again.

This continues, with the track getting wilder and longer, until one of you reaches a certain point threshold (3000 in a four-player game), and a winner is declared. If more than one person reaches the 3000-point threshold at the same time, a sudden death faceoff ensues, where the barriers around the track are removed.

Like its Micro Machines inspiration, anyone who is pushed off the bottom of the screen by racers zooming ahead is eliminated. But unlike Micro Machines, the action doesn’t stop when this happens. Any player who has plunged off the side of the track or been pushed off the screen will magically reappear at the next checkpoint, and there are lots of these at regular intervals, so the pace never drops, and no one is out of action for long. Even better, players get points every time they pass a checkpoint, along with a little bonus for coming first, so even if you’re constantly being shunted off the track, there are plenty of point-scoring opportunities to get back into contention.

The track building works brilliantly, with all sorts of fun pieces to choose from, like a loop the loop, a worryingly narrow bridge, and a nasty couple of pieces with big holes in them. There are loads more track sections and obstacles to unlock along the way, too, and the beauty of the collaborative track building is that you only have yourselves to blame if together you contruct a nightmare of a course. I remember when playing at EGX that we made some hellish thing with a sheer drop after a slippery hairpin, and not one of us could get past it at first. But eventually, after many scenes of us all sliding to oblivion and restarting at the previous checkpoint, I managed to slowly creep around the nightmare corner to the next checkpoint, causing us all to spontaneously cheer with delight.

Delight is the word – playing Make Way in local multiplayer is an absolute riot, and it’s simple enough for anyone to pick up and play. There’s also the option of steering assist for younger or less experienced participants, which can balance the playing field nicely. In short, it’s an absolute blast, and you’ll be laughing your socks off in no time.

There are a couple of rough edges: I noticed the occasional frame-rate drop, for example. But overall, the Scottish indie studio Ice Beam Games has done a phenomenal job in putting this together, especially in making the track-building mechanic work so quickly and flawlessly.

I haven’t tried the online mode yet, but on the strength of the local multiplayer mode alone, I can heartily recommend Make Way – especially for Christmas gatherings with the family. Get this game, grab four controllers, and start smiling.

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Make Way was developed by Ice Beam Games and published by Secret Mode, and it’s available on PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, PS4, PS5, and Switch. We played the PC and Switch versions.

Disclosure statement: review code for Make Way was provided by Secret Mode. A Most Agreeable Pastime operates as an independent site, and all opinions expressed are those of the author.

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