Four years ago, What the Golf? was an incredibly fun surprise that I still fondly remember to this day. It was a silly and playful physics based adventure game that turned different genre mechanics on their head and I was somewhat surprised that the team behind that game decided to essentially repeat the idea with What the car?, after VR experiments with What the bat? This time it’s racing games, instead of golf, and while the results are still funny, something is definitely lacking.
So yeah, this is “not actually a racing game” and instead the fact that you control a car is used to fit a variety of different mechanics and genre parodies, just like it was with golf the last time. So expect lots of silly and unexpected twists and funny moments as you go through the different levels across several themed game worlds. Player-made content is now (and a level creator) are now integrated into the layout and the “story” from the start and it seems like the developers are banking on this and content updates for the game far harder this time than they did with What the Golf?
Which isn’t a bad thing, i suppose, if not for the fact that What the Car? is much less interesting to replay as it feels considerably more… tame? Granted, the first title and its very simple “video game golf mechanic” were very easy to integrate into a variety of genres, but in the case of this title, even the racing-like levels don’t really feel like racing games or how they control. And from there, even though fun variety does happen, there’s not a lot of things that are actually surprising or unexpected. There are almost no moments, except for a few one-off levels, where the game completely reinvents itself and it’s almost as if the developers have run themselves into a corner by taking the car theme as the core of this game.
On top of that, while the previous game also suffered from unnecessary “challenge” conditions for optional rewards, when most of the success depended on pure luck, What the Car? is built almost completely around it. And yet, it has even more “difficult” levels and things to do. About half-way through the second episode I realized that I frankly don’t care about getting rewards and played the rest of the game just finishing all of the normal levels. And I feel like it was a smart decision, as if I would’ve tried to get all gold crowns and do the harder levels, I would’ve stopped playing the game out of frustration. And I feel that perhaps the game would’ve benefitted from just counting finishing levels, while levels themselves could be more bizarre.
What the car? is a fun and silly game, with lots of fun levels and I enjoyed playing it. But at the same time, I doubt I will ever launch it again and unlike What the golf? this game doesn’t really feel that memorable or exciting. It’s a solid piece of entertainment, best enjoyed if you ignore the game pretending that it has “rankings” and “hard levels”, and just playing it the way you want it.