Death machines, tanks, armored vans and even flying warships, You can all find them in War Riders. A game that mixes guns and racing in an MMO-type vehicular battle game that incentivizes players with crypto tokens by blowing up other cars and mining tokens in an apocalyptic sand dune. Rev your engines and tune up as we dive into the mayhem of War Riders.

Background

War Riders is a massively multiplayer online action game ruled by cars and vehicles instead of the usual knights and mages. This game lets players own the cars and weapons they use as Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs). It was developed by Cartified Inc. founded in 2015 and based in North America. The game is built on Ethereum although the team is implementing a hybrid chain where they have a dedicated game chain for the transactions done inside War Riders for faster transactions.

Graphics and Gameplay

Reminiscent of Mad Max, you control a vehicle in a post-apocalyptic city found in a sand dune where you and other vehicles fight over Benzene (the token inside the game) nodes scattered across the map. The graphics for the cars are fairly realistic although it doesn’t stand up to most modern racing games.

Aside from driving these vehicles, they’re equipped with up to two main weapons and an alternative weapon that you can use to help protect yourself while you are mining for tokens or to trap other players if you want to take a more sneaky and calculated approach. Although your gameplay will most likely be affected by the stats of the vehicle you’ll be using since there is an RNG component in the vehicles so each one can be unique.

There are different rarities for the vehicles starting from regular to premium types as well as 1000 ‘special vehicles’ available like a Lambo, an armored truck, and even a Hovercraft with special traits like quick acceleration, increased defense, and easy maneuverability. Each car also has a Benzene tank which will get filled up as they collect from the nodes. When a vehicle is destroyed in combat, it drops all the benzene it collected that can be picked up by the one who eliminated it.

Creating strategies and looking for the perfect timing before getting that shiny benzene may be something to consider and as well as planning routes back to your garage to keep your benzene safe in this mine-and-brawl game.

Earning Mechanics

As mentioned, War Riders use Benzene (BZN) to power its in-game economy. It’s an ERC-20 token deployed in the Ethereum Network and a total of 75,000,000 BZN will be available for players to ‘mint’ inside the game. You can also trade cars and weapons as an extra source of income if you want to flip your NFTs in the game’s marketplace.

Final Thoughts

The mechanics in War Riders help give crypto miners a new take on what it is to mine cryptocurrency. It shows that mining can be fun but still challenging as you have to face off against other players as well if you want to get your hand in that shiny Benzene you’re all after.

Although I believe the game is far from perfect as you can go on long drives without seeing a node or even other players which is very boring and time-consuming. The replayability for me isn’t that high as there’s not much to do but run around and shoot other vehicles. I hope the developers can create extra game modes and in-game events to help keep the game interesting for a longer period of time.

Overall, I think the idea behind War Riders is fun although I don’t see myself going in the dunes as I believe it is kind of pay-to-win with vehicles that have stronger weapons and overall better vehicles than you. Not to mention that their social media and community are not that active which makes it a sign that many of its players have already lost interest in the project and this will affect both the game and the price of the token. I think War Riders won with an interesting idea but not the fun and longevity war that other crypto games may offer.