Car Rush and Games Like It: What Kind of Racer It Is

Who made it

Car Rush is an HTML5 game by CodeThisLab, a studio that makes browser games. The build hosted here carries their logo in the credits panel. The yellow convertible you drive has the plate CTL 104. The game draws everything on a single canvas with the CreateJS library, so it needs no plugin or download.

What kind of racer it is

It is easy to file Car Rush with endless traffic games, where you dodge cars until the first crash. It works differently. The camera sits behind the car and the road is drawn segment by segment as it curves and climbs ahead of you, the same into-the-screen view that classic arcade road racers used. Every track has a start, a finish and a clock. You win by reaching the end in time, not by surviving as long as you can. There are no coins to collect and no shop.

How the traffic behaves

All the other vehicles drive the same way you do. There are three car models, a bus and a semi truck. Each one gets its own speed when the track loads: cars and buses travel at between a quarter and three quarters of your top speed, and semis at between a quarter and a half. If you are flat out, you are always the fastest thing on the road. Traffic moves sideways a little when it closes on a slower vehicle or on you, so a gap can shrink as you reach it.

Crashes slow you, they do not end the race

A collision never ends a run on its own. Hit the back of a car and your speed drops below that car's speed. Hit scenery and the car almost stops. Above about a third of top speed, a crash also shakes the screen and plays a crash sound. The real penalty is the time you lose getting back up to speed. In the next race you start from zero and reach top speed after about five seconds of holding the accelerator.

Grip and corners

Bends push the car towards the outside, and the push grows with speed, so a corner you can take at half speed may throw you off the road at full speed. The desert world has half the grip of the other two. Steering there is slower and bends push you out twice as hard. Lifting off the accelerator slows the car gently. Braking slows it hard, from full speed to a stop in about a second, so a short brake is usually enough.

Other games on this site

If you want more driving after Car Rush, the Traffic Racing shelf on carrush.org has Highway Traffic, Retro Highway, Truck Traffic, Crazy Road Trip, Racing Rampage, Survival Race and Mph. For other kinds of driving, the Racing shelf has games such as Drift Boss, Smash Karts and Crazy Cars, and the Bikes and Stunts shelf has Moto X3M. Each one has its own page with its own controls. None of them works quite like Car Rush, which is the only one built around a timed point-to-point track.