Car Quest Deluxe

TL;DR - a vehicle-based collectathon which is unfortunately linear, janky, and whose length has been excessively padded. Skip this one. The game is built around collecting 'artifacts,' various shapes that slot into the environment and cause changes that let you explore further. Unfortunately, the levels are designed in a way where changes generally occur far away, not only out of your line of sight (ignoring camera cutaways) but also often in the place you just came from. You zigzag across the map, blowing a lot of time, and it grates on you. This would make you inclined to break sequence once you have a vehicle that allows it, but the game is not designed well enough for this. You can accidentally skip two levels if you go out of sequence, forcing you to get their collectibles in new game+, starting yet another drawn-out linear playthrough. The bizarre thing is, other parts of the game seem to have no issue with breaking sequence, forcing the world to match the intended state that the furthest artifact in the sequence would result in. Other times, the developers added invisible walls or death fields to prevent you from going out of sequence. This doesn't jive with the elements of the game built around speedrunning. In addition to the level design being linear, even unlocking cars is linear. You can only unlock a car if you've unlocked every previous car leading up to it, all for 4 wheel tokens each. Up until I realized this, I was saving up tokens hoping to unlock the more useful cars first, but they never displayed a price. Since a lot of the wheel tokens demand specific vehicles' abilities, even the order in which you collect them is as linear as the order of car unlocks. Another issue I have with the game is tied in with the vehicle unlocks. Throughout the game, you are teased with things you can't access or interact with until you either unlock a particular vehicle, or until you beat the game. I wasted way too much time on my first playthrough trying to find ways to reach all of this with the starting car, only to find that the game breaks from the format of artifacts changing the world. Instead, it just changes a number of things after you beat the game, and some things are just inaccessible without a particular vehicle. It's telling that the trailer largely shows vehicles you will not be driving for the majority of your playtime. There are some other baffling design decisions, and other undeveloped mechanics. One level is just a maze with heavy fog preventing you from seeing more than two car lengths ahead of you, and with no landmarks to navigate by. They put some wheel tokens not only inside this maze, but outside the walls of this maze. Level portals only occasionally have something to indicate what level they lead to. Two levels share the same portal, so you are always blocked from accessing at least one of them until you start a new playthrough for whatever collectibles you missed. The same goes for another two levels which get blocked off after you beat them. You have to spend batteries every single time you enter and exit a level, not just once to unlock it. If you leave the hints setting on, all of the commentary interruptions by Lord Blockstar are mandatory, and can't be separated from the camera cutaways to what an artifact changes. Some completed challenges only temporarily change the environment, so you'll annoyingly have to complete them again. Especially annoying is when the change is opening a door to a portal, and you suddenly discover you don't have enough batteries to enter. Even after you've started new game+, you can't start over again until you find all of the museum exhibits, which again, runs against the speedrunning mechanics. While some of the vehicles you unlock are very useful and functional on their own, others like the spider car are not. While the spider car can climb on walls, it has no means of getting onto the wall without some existing ramp, or without switching between it and the frog car that can jump. The car physics don't feel like they've been tuned enough - a light tap on the brake will make you skid until you've slowed down to almost nothing, and so you turn really poorly. You fall obnoxiously slowly. Even if you let off the gas in midair, you will accelerate on landing based on the existing spin of the wheels, and since this is done for each of the wheels, even slightly uneven landings will result in a hard turn to one side. There's no good way to come to a complete stop, since there's only gas/reverse, and there's next to no friction to bring you to a stop. The game has cubes you can park under to be reminded of what changes you most recently caused, but this falls apart if you sequence break, which I accidentally did on my first playthrough. You can only have one save file. New game+ does not carry over the batteries, only the wheel tokens you've collected and cars you've unlocked. While there are good elements, the bad outshines them. Even after three playthroughs to get everything, I can't recommend this game.

I can say hands down if I had a shelf for my top games , car quest would be on it. Car Quest Deluxe is a revamped version of the switch , updated looks, cars with multiple features, and most obviously a new platform to play it let's me fanboy what I feel in love with on the switch. while it adds a bit more from the switch version I'm still counting it to be one in the same from the experience and the overall charm that is Car Quest. I can go on an on about the details of the game, but it would be faster to play it for yourself.

[quote] A review copy was provided by the developer. [/quote] 🔶 [b] Car Quest is a 3d platform game with a car and a lot of exploration, explore a full ancient world with the help of an Amnesiac Moaï [/b] 🔶 [h2] Graphics (6 / 10) : [/h2] Ok graphics, but many things look like the same because of the overall “cubic” design. There a main huge overall world with access of many different small levels, each of these levels have his own design. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3132438113 [h2] Gameplay (7 / 10) : [/h2] Really simple gameplay, with simple control, the main interest of the game is exploration, getting artefact for unlocking new path for discover new levels, narration is well done with a Moaï that will describe everything that happen is this world, from new path unlocked, new levels to some story about him. You must also collect battery for teleporting into small levels, and optional wheels for unlocking new cars with ability (Boost, Collect twice more Battery) https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3132438334 [h2] Price (5 / 10) : [/h2] Game cost 17 euros and take around 5-10+ hours for main. Too high priced for this narrative experience. [h2] Story/Music/Optimization (7 / 10) : [/h2] Story is one of the strength of the game, a Moaï that will follow you in you’re adventure, with full English voice and translate in multiples languages (play on French in my side), Translation is pretty week with many spelling and grammar errors (at last on French) https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3132438955 The music is ok, calm music according to the base gameplay of it, you have all the time you want to explore. No problem of optimization during gameplay, the game is fluid and don't freeze (played on i5 / 2 Go VRAM / 8 Go RAM) [h2] Final Note (6.2 / 10) : [/h2] 🔶 [b] Car Quest is a 3d platform with a car focused on exploration and a narrative story, pretty unique experience, but with a too high price [/b] 🔶 💚💚💚 : - A huge world to explore, with many sides levels - Great narrative design, voiced and translated, being followed by the Moaï ❌❌❌ : - High price. - Overall “cubic” design, that can make difficult to find your way around, at last of the main world. [quote][url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/32732116-IndieGems/] Follow [b]IndieGems[/b] [/url] for more reviews like this one. [/quote]

Ramp.

[spoiler]Car Quest[/spoiler]

This is the best video game I've ever played in my life. I love to car, I love to quest. What more can I ask? I think a partnership with MapQuest would've been good though.

I feel like seeing footage of this game or even just hearing the concept gives the wrong impression of what you're getting here. I don't mean that as like actual false-advertising, but when I see footage of an adventure game where you play as a car picking up collectibles, my mind wanders to open collectathon levels a la Banjo-Kazooie, where you're boosting around big areas fit for a car and off of ramps for sick air time, maybe with some racing levels thrown in. The concept practically writes itself... but this is not what Car Quest is. The main gameplay consists of driving across a simple path to reach a collectible, which opens up a small area somewhere else on the map to pick up another collectible, rinse and repeat. It's an agonizingly linear structure for such a big hub world, often with paths skinny enough that you'll rarely want to reach top speed, and the distance from one collectible to another often spans the entire area. And you don't get a map. By the end of the game, the paths you open up get so expansive and maze-like that I've sometimes had to look up a walkthrough just to find where I'm supposed to go (and funnily enough the guy I was watching seemed just as lost). The rest of the game has you going into much smaller levels, which are unlocked through the same linear collection quests, with basically the same gameplay structure. These are a bit more interactive and incorporate a few cool ideas, but some of its best go underutilized and there's few highlights in general. For the most part it's the same tedious driving over the same paths again and again to collect new artifacts, and driving over a ramp at max speed to cross a small gap is the biggest challenge you'll be presented with. It doesn't help that getting into the levels at all requires an often ridiculous amount of batteries (the game's infinitely respawning collectible), which means that if you don't have enough for the next area then you'll have to grind for a while. And keep in mind that when I say you need batteries to get into a level, I mean you need that many batteries [i]every time[/i] you want to enter that same level, and beating the game will require a few revisits. Another big disappointment is the car itself, which can drift (though I never found a use for it) but has no ability to boost. You'll see in the trailer that there's a bunch of different cars with a bunch of different abilities, one of which can in fact boost, and that's another area I got the wrong impression on. New cars are unlocked through coins, which are so difficult to find and collect (generally impossible with the default car) that you most likely won't unlock more than a couple before the game is basically over. It seems like the coins you collect and the cars you unlock persist between playthroughs, but this game really isn't worth more than one. What I think will make or further break this game for a lot of people is Lord Blockstar, your ever-present companion and info dumper. He'll stop the game to explain the effects of just about every collectible you find and crack some bad jokes for good measure, and for the majority of the game he's the only character you'll be interacting with in any way. Though very annoying, the sheer amount of times he'd stop to explain a ramp you activated wrapped back around to being funny and earnest to me, and I'd be lying if I said that wasn't my favorite part of the entire game. The actual story is fun too, even if it takes a good while to pick up. I feel really bad for hating on this game because I really wanted to like it, and I can really sense the team had fun making it. But it hurts because I feel like this game should be so much better than it is; like I said, the concept practically writes itself. This could've been a fast-paced sandboxy adventure that really takes advantage of car physics, and instead it's more like a tedious tutorial drawn out over the course of eight hours.