Stuttering, bugs, and fundamental design flaws.

First off, the dev's claim that this is "a driving simulator designed to help novice drivers master driving" stinks of the same false, deceptive advertisement as Disney's "Baby Einstein" crap. Make no mistake: This is a GAME. It will not teach you to drive any more than playing Red Dead Redemption will teach you to ride a horse.

I knew it was a game going in. I expected nothing more, but sadly got a whole lot less.

But let's start with the positives. The graphics are pretty. The rain effects are nice. Having proper pedestrians walking across the roads adds a lot to the immersion compared to other driving games like Motortown, SnowRunner, or SCS's Truck Simulators.

Yet, as much as I knew and accepted that this was not an actual teaching tool, I certainly didn't expect it to be yet another "grandpa's old" game, where you start by inheriting something from a relative that you neither earned nor deserve. Grandpa's old farm, grandpa's old rifle, grandpa's old fishing boat, grandpa's old fill-in-the-stupid blank... In this case, it's your ugly, peppy, super-talkative uncle giving you his crappy old car, but the concept is the same. (Seriously, "grandpa's old" really should be its own game genre by now!) Having a "story" in a game like this always reduces the enjoyment factor, but it's even worse when the story is this trite and unimaginative. All we needed were proper objectives like in Motortown, but the sandbox mode doesn't allow you to do delivery missions and such, so if you want objectives and progression, you're stuck with Uncle Whatever-his-name-was.

But the annoying uncle is just the start of this game's problems.

Compared to other driving games, the steering feels awkward on a standard gamepad. Making precision turns in a car was harder here than driving a truck in ETS2. The dev seems to assume all players have a proper wheel and pedals set up. Many of us don't.

Meanwhile, the gamepad's right stick can be configured to move the camera, but your character doesn't freely turn his head. Instead, the camera near-instantly snaps 45 degrees to the left or 90 degrees to the right. There's no in-between, so you can't turn your head properly to the left to check for on-coming traffic, or look over your shoulder when backing up. You can't even tilt the camera up to check the traffic light above you. There's no way to look around the car's blind spots without switching to 3rd-person view, and even then, the camera movement is strangely limited.

What was the dev thinking here?! How do you mess up something as insanely simple as a 1st-person-view free-look camera? Did it not occur to the dev that a player might want to look over their shoulder, or look 45 degrees to the right instead of 90 degrees, or look 90 degrees to the left instead of 45? This might have been acceptable in an arcade racer, but not being able to freely turn your head in what the dev claims is a "driving simulator" is beyond incompetent.

This alone would have easily warranted my refund request, but sadly, there were performance issues as well. The game frequently stutters with noticeable frame rate drops. The UI is clunky and can freeze up for several seconds at a time. The phone GPS is tiny and generally useless. Why isn't there a proper GPS in the actual car?! What is this, 1984?

Yes, I'm well aware that it's Early Access. But many of the problems here are not of the "early access" variety. They are fundamental design flaws at the conceptual level. It is not "by accident" or "a bug" that the uncle exists or that the cockpit view is useless. It is by design. And that says enough about this game and its dev that I shall have nothing more to do with either.

(It's also very telling that the dev is replying to nearly every negative review on Steam: it shows that the dev is wasting time doing PR damage control when they could be actually working on improving their game.)


26/8/18: Edited for clarity.

I ended up getting a refund on this game. Graphics were great and had no skipping or anything, it worked well with my wheel too. The biggest flaw for me was not been able to use VR like you could in the first rendition of this game. The thing that made this worse for me is I used UEVR to port the game to VR (which ran great still) but, because the mirrors don't render ALL the time, it is pointless, you still need to press buttons to use mirrors which renders VR unnecessary. For a driving simulator you would want VR to work!!

No mod, no life.

I'm really enjoying City Car Driving 2.0. The foundation here is solid, and driving around the city has been a blast. It’s in Early Access, but seeing where it is already makes me genuinely look forward to what the full release in a year or so is going to look like.

Is it worth getting right now? Absolutely. If you enjoy driving sims and want to be part of the journey as the developers build it out, definitely pick it up. Recommended!

less playability than 1.0, can not do proper shoulder check, very limited sandbox mode

i would only get if u had a wheel to use on it but its very realistic in the controls