Received this game in bundle sometime in the past and figured I'd try it.
I wouldn't recommend this game for probably 90%+ of the population, honestly. It's not very intuitive and "realism" isn't a defense for this one, at all. The 10% of people that might like this are those fine with really unintuitive (but seemingly deep) games and likely people that have worked on their own cars in the past since that actually helps here. If I could, I'd rate this as a "mixed" recommendation instead.
Complaints so far:
- Tutorial is likely the most useless I've encountered in a game. You just need to take the car to a test track, but it doesn't explain any mechanics, goals, controls, or tasks to you. There are no indicators on where the test track is, and everywhere you look a popup appears explaining how something works that's entirely unrelated to the test track.
- After the tutorial, you get dumped in an empty garage and have zero guidance after this. I spent ~15 minutes walking around and looking at objects until I finally Googled it. Apparently, there's a silent "phone" that you interact with to receive orders, but again, there were no indicators (noise, waypoints, "quest logs") to point you here.
- Immediately after opening the game I noticed the mouse felt terrible. Some quick research indicated it's a software mouse (for controller users) and they said it wouldn't change, which is a bad experience on PC imo.
- There are zero indicators so far for things like oil levels, making it easy to overfill engines. The only defense of this (ridiculous, but whatever) would be "realism" which is nonsense, I'll explain below more.
Realism is often a facade for jank in these types of games, you can often tell the difference between this and curated realism by how it's implemented. In this case, as someone who has replaced fairly complicated parts on my prior cars, this is a [i]close[/i] approximation of part installation.
My first customer was an oil change, where I had to figure out how to move the car onto the lift. After lifting the car and moving the reservoir into place, I couldn't find a oil pan drain plug anywhere. I resorted to pulling the filter (which I don't think was necessary?) and finally interacting with the reservoir, which gave me a "use" option to automatically drain the oil. For a game that requires me to put every single clip back onto the air filter housing, not having a oil pan plug is a weird choice.
That being said, I'm able to fumble my way through the game and it scratches a similar itch to PC Building Simulator. So, if that all sounds interesting to you, might be worth checking out.
