car

beefy 5 layer burrito

There's something about completely dismantling and reassembling something that is just really cathartic for me, and if I'm honest, this game really satisfies that itch that I didn't know I had.

Graphically speaking, it is a really solid game-- the cars all look really good, and it has a decent array of both modern and classic cars for all interests, my own being more leaning towards the muscle cars of the late 60's and early 70's.

It is also quite intricate in the parts you dismantle from the cars, albeit simplifying it down for an easier to understand model. I found myself really enjoying the complete strip-down and reconstruction of the cars I'd picked up from the various locations you could get them from, and while I never played the earlier versions of Car Mechanic Simulator, I did feel like it was a sort of definitive edition of the game. Though not without its faults.

As you can imagine there's a lot you can do with the game-- get an essential skeleton of a car from the junkyard and build up your own car, from tuning it up with high performance parts, repairing components and upgrading them to give them some extra power, or even just do up the cars so that you can sell them on for some major profit. These are all parts of the game I fully engaged in and found myself getting sucked in deeper and deeper, until I was 100+ hours into the game!

You do have some 'story' missions, where customers bring their cars in for various repairs, etc., and whilst these were fine for the most part, the further into them you went, the more I'd encounter instances where I would misstep in replacing components, since the game is VERY particular about where you put them when only certain things need replacing, and the other components around them happen to be below the replacement part percentage. The biggest pains were the Piston Rings, which I replaced one in the wrong exact location no end of times, and had to completely dismantle the whole engine to get back to it.

It did start to get a little long, though not unwelcome whilst aiming for the 100% achievements, as there is no indicator for how many times you've run the path test, or how many cars you've sold or bought from various locations, just to name a couple examples, but it was only when I was just a few away when I started to feel a little fatigued from the repetitive motions, perhaps brought on by my infectious need to perfectly reconstruct the car.

Another unfortunate thing with the game is that whilst you can keep your own cars in storage, there isn't really too much need to, other than a desire to own them. There aren't really any particular tasks that you need to perform outside of an individual race track loop to get a particular time, and some of the DLC, such as thew Drag Racing DLC, didn't really pull me in as much as the mechanical side of the game did. But, it was nice having my own car parked up outside the garage.

There is a lot of variety in what you can do with the cars here, and I feel like I could have picked this up at an earlier time and happily played through it for just as long as I have done, but I think a little over two weeks non-stop play has really brought that itch under control, finally.

To finish off, it's a great game, and really cathartic if you're into, or can get into, the repetitive motions of the game, with a slight caveat regarding the later story missions that may have you redoing all your work if you aren't paying attention. Well worth picking up though, for sure.