A game doesn’t always need a sprawling narrative or a massive map covered in objective markers. Sometimes, less is more. There are days when all we want is to shut off our brains after a long day, pick a fast ride, and weave through traffic until our reflexes take over. LANESPLIT does exactly this for us, and we couldn’t love it more. FunkyMouse strips away the excess and focuses purely on the thrill of high-speed motorcycle dodging. It’s a title that excels at burning rubber on its digital highways. Its minimalist approach holds up quite well, and as it turns out, there is a lot to appreciate in keeping things simple.
Gear and Garage or Suiting Up
There are a few customization options in the garage menu where we can pick certain looks for the driver and the bike. We don’t have direct control over the look, just presets. There are nine characters for the driver and 16 completely different bikes that handle differently on the road. Some of them are quite expensive to unlock. There are also plenty of color choices. We can paint different parts to make sure the bike looks exactly how we want. From there, we have two options for playing the game: solo or multiplayer, either by creating or joining a match.
Hitting the Asphalt or Navigating the Traffic
But enough with the menu, time to ride. Hitting play let us pick between three maps. We went with the second one, Grimsel Spiral, because it features two things we love: snow and the Aurora Borealis. We can choose dry or wet weather, as well as zen, normal, medium, or heavy traffic. Depending on what we choose, the experience changes a lot. Naturally, wet roads and heavier traffic increase the challenge.
Once we’re in the world, we need to pay attention to scoring. The higher the speed and the more overtakes we pull off, the faster we build points. If we drive too slow or crash our bike into a barrier, the points reset. Depending on how fast we were driving when we hit an obstacle, we either immediately recover, get a temporary blackout, or ragdoll. Experiencing these crashes for the first few times is exhilarating, but after a while, we started to dread them. Thankfully, we can quickly jump back into the action and start weaving through traffic again. After a bit, all we want to do is drive flawlessly.
Chasing the Flow State or The Thrill of the Ride
That’s pretty much it for LANESPLIT. There is no story, no objectives, and not even a map to distract us. It’s just us, the road, and the vehicles. It is a simple game that’s difficult to master, even on zen mode. It doesn’t try to be too many things at once. Its main purpose is to give us instant gratification by letting us experience the joy of the ride. And what a joy that is. The speed is palpable. We can really feel it, especially when the music intensifies. There is this moment where if we go fast enough, everything around us slows to a crawl. We also love how the soundtrack’s volume and complexity increase the faster we drive. When LANESPLIT clicks, it feels amazing. We really can’t compare that feeling of speed to any other game.
The graphics aren’t extraordinary, but they are very serviceable, even though the traffic vehicles seem very similar to each other. Some of the vehicles we pass seem to glide, and during certain crashes, it feels like physics goes out the window. Still, it’s nothing too terrible. As an added bonus, LANESPLIT also has a VR version. We weren’t able to test it, but from what we read online, it’s supposed to be a great game for virtual reality.
End of the Road?
If you come home after a long day of work and just want fifteen minutes of fast-paced biking, avoiding obstacles, and becoming one with the wind, then LANESPLIT is a great game to play in short bursts, especially with the multiplayer and leaderboard systems. However, if you expect something more complex, like in-depth maps with a campaign or standard objectives, then might be a hard pass.
- Developer: FunkyMouse
- Publisher: FunkyMouse
- Platforms: Windows PC
- Release Date: January 29, 2026
- Genre: Driving
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