You Suck at Parking is one of those games that is as fun as its ridiculous name would suggest. It is essentially a precision driving game where your goal is exactly what the title says: drive your car around increasingly elaborate courses, dodge traps and pits, and park it in the designated spots. Simple enough, right?
The levels do shine. They start relatively simple, but gradually introduce ramps, obstacles, moving platforms, tight corners, fireballs, traffic, police and even other crazy hazards that force you to get more precise with your driving. Some will get seriously frustrating but the reattempt cycle is really fast because all parking spots are only a few seconds away, so you keep going at it like crazy until you eventually succeed. You have to manage your speed, direction and timing while trying to get the car into the right place without wrecking your car in one of the multiple ways to do so. Because you are playing a parking game, if you halt the car anywhere, it's considered parked, so if it's outside the designated spots, it's a loss.
The thing is, the car is actually really fun to drive. It handles surprisingly well, with a nice balance between responsiveness and momentum, and drifting around corners feels exceptionally great. When you get the hang of it, it may even feel strange just how smooth you can get that initially seemingly janky car drifting around a large curve before you jump over a cliff into some fan that sends you against some bomb. It's a crazy setup and the rythm is high since the maps are actually tight and tangled and you can just hit a key and immediately start over without any interruption. From start to each parking spot can range between like 2 to 30 seconds, but probably rarely more, if ever.
These levels are distributed between three major biomes, and each one has a sort of a "hub" composed of several interconnected islands and in each there are some "zones" where groups of levels are arranged together. These hubs are a bit of a mess. It feels more complicated than it needs to be and doesn't quite have the same clarity as the actual levels. Every time you complete a level group you have to drive around that open map looking for the next group, and these are not exactly clear and so you have to search and jump between islands looking for the next. This is not as easy as it sounds and gets in the way more than it should, feeling borderline unnecessary.
Once you finish a level you have some points corresponding to the number of parkings you have completed, and different points if you managed to park in all spots of a level "perfectly", without any reattempts. These other points serve as progression lock between islands so there is some push to perfect some levels in order to access later levels.
On every level you are being measured not only for that perfection to accumulate those points, which is a single player progression system, but also for time. There are global worldwide rankings for speed on each level, and also for your friends that you can use to compare yourself against!
There is also a strange currency system surrounding car customization. I could not really understand this, there are some things you can change, like a few cars, colors, patterns and accessories, but there is also a lot of stuff locked behind some currency that I honestly could not figure out. Maybe related with multiplayer?
As of this writing, multiplayer is basically dead. I could never find a match so I could not test it, which is a shame because a game like this seems almost tailor-made for competing with other players, comparing times and watching everyone spectacularly fail at the same corner. The single-player experience is still perfectly enjoyable, though, but the multiplayer component doesn't add much if you don't have people to play directly with.
A little note to the music. I felt that there was basically 1 single level music. It's a soft gentle tune, that kind of elevator music, but after some reattempts and if you overstay on a level after too many fails, a lady voice will start singing "you suck at parking" in a very melodic way. It's great!
Still, the important thing is that You Suck at Parking is just really fun to play. The driving feels good, the levels are varied and entertaining, and the difficulty generally stays in that sweet spot where failing makes you want to try again rather than quit.
If you like short, challenging arcade games where mastering the controls to progress over crazy levels is the main reward, or if you only have a few minutes to burn and want quick action, and even if you obsess on taking that extra milisecond over that global board, this is an easy recommendation.
