Car Quest Deluxe Reviews

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.