Vangers is an intoxicating premise: human/alien hybrids drive cars through strange worlds, participate in races, and discover secrets beyond. Actually playing it though? Vangers plays like garbage and is an extremely tedious and frustrating exercise.

An advanced race of human/alien hybrids produces a racing mercenary known as a Vanger (you) - the main objective is to move across bases in alien worlds, doing odd jobs such as deliveries and side quests along with participating in special races. If the player is lucky, these will gain them currency to buy more weapons, vehicles, and equipment for flying, burrowing, floating, etc. Once the player has won enough races, they can move to another world via wormholes called Passages. The player can also destroy other racers in combat - the stats gained by sidequests and races/combat will help the player find items and other important bits in the landscape.

The landscape is extremely uneven and hazardous - there's a stable road in some cases, but AI vehicles are annoyingly aggressive and the vehicle will often get stuck off the beaten path. There's a state-of-the-art deformable terrain system, but it often becomes a bother as the player can get stuck in deformed terrain of their own design and it's advisable not to save deformed terrain changes.

As for the vehicle's controls, the vehicle can accelerate, spring jump by holding down a jump button, and tip back up if the vehicle gets tipped over. Practicing controls seems important, but it's so easy to get stuck and aiming jumps/movement properly is a crapshoot, especially in tight combat or in races.

Progress is extremely slow and tedious. While in the first world the player can look for alternate ways to get by (deliveries take MUCH too long to make decent money), once the player moves to other worlds the tabutasks become infuriatingly difficult and the races almost unbeatable unless the player has top of the line equipment, which gets the player stuck in a loop where they don't have enough money to progress unless they do the most menial taskwork and even with better equipment the difficulty feels impossible and random. Even basic elements such as tracking quests (tabutasks) is strangely absent, and bugs can make objectives disappear.

The worlds are intentionally strange and ugly, with many curves and bumps depicting strange alien landscapes that take on different hues based on time of day. The creatures themselves are interesting enough, with strange bug-like designs. Dialogue is mostly uninteresting though, with "counselors" in bases often looking annoyed and telling you what to do. The glossary of terms seems intimidating at first but the player will quickly understand that basic terms are just hidden behind kooky words like stinkhorns and beeborats, and that there's not much to the worlds themselves save for racing rituals, slavery, and other concepts that don't have interesting enough characters to make the terrible gameplay worth it.

Vangers is a uniquely miserable experience, with some of the worst vehicle controls I've dealt with combined with frustrating quests and uninteresting worlds. Don't let the quirky visuals fool you.