Car Mechanic Simulator 2018 challenges players to repair, paint, tune and drive cars. Find classic, unique cars in the new Barn Find module and Junkyard module. You can even add your self-made car.
Job simulator games are a special brand- for some, they are attracted by a particular kind of obtuse and that always goes out of its way to replicate an experience. In Car Mechanic Simulator 2018, you largely play in a garage where you restore rusted vehicles, sell them, which allows you to buy another vehicle, restore it, and do it all again. It’s a slow, methodical manner of progress, but the largest question with these types of games is: Does it work? Does Car Mechanic Simulator 2018 break down, or does it go the full mile? Let’s find out.
Car Mechanic Simulator 2018 is a game with a plethora of customization options, allowing you to modify everything from rim and tire sizes to tire widths and myriads of selections that can be made for the interior and exterior of a vehicle. Players take jobs fixing underperforming or flat out broken vehicles, measuring how much you put into the vehicle to repair it, getting paid, and then funneling that money toward your next, potentially more difficult project. You order parts for vehicles from your computer, or may scour a junkyard to score parts on the cheap, all of which has an impact on how profitable repairing each car may be for you by the time the job is done, as gameplay rewards are doled out in a very cathartic input = output model.
- The Bestselling Car Mechanic Simulator series goes to a new level! Car Mechanic Simulator 2018 challenges players to repair, paint, tune and drive cars. Find classic, unique cars in the new Barn Find module and Junkyard module. You can even add your self-made car in the Car Editor.
- Car Mechanic Simulator 2018 has expanded itself with three new additions since the year began. We have classic cars in the shape of Bentleys, sleek sports cars from Lotus, and high-end high-priced Paganis.
- The 3rd installment in the Car Mechanic Simulator franchise, and the 1st to be released on consoles.
Players can perform tire and oil changes, balance tires, remove and rebuild engines. Vehicles can be painted, detailed, tuned, and cars can even be driven. New vehicles can be found in barns or junkyards, and you can take before and after photos of what arrives into your repair shop so you can keep track of the progress you’ve made on the various cars available. Of course, it’s not just up for you to find new cars in the wild (crikey!), as the game seems to have a near limitless number of missions it can randomly generate for you to complete, so you will always have something to do. Players can remove, add, or adjust parts for cars on basically a whim, so rebuilding a car will be a common task that is undertaken.
So what’s better than repairing cars and watching numbers representing money? Watching numbers representing your skills, of course. In Car Mechanic 2018, there is a light RPG system available that allows you to improve a variety of skills that may make later actions more profitable, or more expedient to consume less of your time per task. Some skills will increase your speed with a screwdriver, allowing you to be done with those actions more quickly. Some of the skills, sadly, are broken- The Educated skill was supposed to give players the ability to see the conditions of car parts when first looking at a car, without having to inspect everything more thoroughly, but the skill, as of the time of this writing, doesn’t actually do anything right now. Thankfully, players can spend a little money to reset skills, though it’s a shame to spend currency in order to fix what shouldn’t have been messed up in the first place.
Most actions are controlled with the mouse. Moving about the garage is a relatively simplistic task, and you simply click on objects you wish to interact with and choose which action you want to perform based on a context-sensitive menu that comes up. For example, if you go into the paint workshop and click on the paint shop tools in back of it, you’ll be given options to paint vehicles parts currently in your possession. The reason this is brought up is due to the fact that you’ll be doing a lot of walking back and forth through the garage, interacting with objects. This is a very easy to control game, which is somewhat rare for a title with the Simulator name.
Car Mechanic Simulator 2018 was a game that took a lot to love, initially. It was released in a horrendous state with a variety of game-ending glitches, to the extent where the game was incredibly difficult to play for a time span of about two weeks (with the first week making play a pure impossibility). That said, a large number of updates have taken place since then and the game has improved significantly during that time span. Initially, players could work on a vehicle and put a fair amount of time, effort, and money into it, but then randomly lose it by moving it from the garage to the parking spaces (the game would randomly delete it). Black screens, freezes, and various other bugs like ones that prevent you from finishing a vehicle exist as well, though a good deal of the most game breaking bugs have been fixed in the last month while optimization seems to have been improved during this same time frame as well.
Graphically, the game looks quite nice, now. Many of the performance bugs and memory issues were eliminated in earlier patches, so the visuals are actually impressive on Ultra settings. The music is less than spectacular, without any tracks that will really stick with you after leaving the game, though you can insert your own music tracks into the game if you like. The sound effects are all reasonable and give you the idea that you’re actually removing bolts, rotating tires, etc., which definitely helps immersion.
Overall, Car Mechanic Simulator 2018 is a reasonable game that, at some point, will hit a state nigh unto perfection. That time is not currently now, however. Even after a significant number of patches, very simple things still manage to be broken. Sometimes you may randomly not receive experience points for completed tasks, buying a car from the junkyard will sometimes, at seemingly random intervals, take your money but not spawn the car in your garage. Even with the latest patch, some skills may actually give you negative XP, making leveling up difficult or outright impossible.
The game has made significant strides in the last month, and only gets better. However, in its current state, I cannot recommend this game to anyone except for hardcore enthusiasts who want a new Simulator game to play. Fans of Car Simulator 2015 may be willing to overlook the wide variety of glitches in 2018’s edition, while those who are less forgiving of glitches but like Sim games may want to wishlist Car Mechanic Simulator 2018 and revisit it sometime in the future, after more patches have been released.
This isn’t to say the game isn’t playable right now- it most certainly is. The issue is that the game simply has so many niggles which detract from the experience that, unless you’re a hardcore fan of the genre, it may still be best to wait until more bugs are fixed. Twenty-eight patches have been released in a month’s time, so the game is clearly receiving updates at a breakneck pace, and hopefully those who are on the fence won’t have long to wait before it is safe to pull the trigger and join us under the hood.
Bonus Content: Blast from the Past! Check out our video review of Car Mechanic Simulator 2015, you know, from way back in 2015.
Developers: Red Dot Games
Platforms: PC, Steam OS
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They're demanding, confusing and boring.
But I like cars quite a bit. So let's see if this game can catch my interest.
STORY
You play as a mechanic. Simple as that.
You take orders and fix cars for money.
And when you have enough money, you can get 'Barn Finds'.
When you get a barn find, you can buy your own car and restore it.
So your job is to restore cars, build up your shop and make some money.
Simple enough.
GAMEPLAY
This is a mixed bag.
There's some good and some bad.
The cars and their parts are very realistic, which I like.
In fact, while working on my first restoration in this game, I watched a video from AutoZone on Youtube about how to find and remove a fuel pump and surprise, it helped in the game. That's how realistic this game is.
Also, one thing I really like about this game is the sense of accomplishment it gives the player. It feels really good to be able to finish off a car and take it out on the drag strip, and it's cool to see how a car evolves from a hunk of scrap to a racing machine.
Another thing I think is neat is how you get parts by buying them off an in-game computer.
Now for the bad.
The driving.
The driving is super-finicky.
Sometimes, your car refuses to turn and sometimes, it refuses to go in a straight line. It's completely unpredictable.
Another annoyance-The radial menu. It's really annoying to use.
The 'game' also has a problem with tedium. Especially with tires.
Car Repair Simulator 2018
I know it's trying to be realistic, but watching the same dull animation 4 times gets annoying.
Another good thing though is this game makes it really to mod the game and create liveries and license plates.
Some people make really awesome, detailed liveries with that. I could only ever do license plates and small little details. But what matters here is that it's easy for folks like me to mod this game.
All in all, the game-play is okay. Not the best, but not unplayable.
Car Mechanic Simulator Pc Download
Car Mechanic Simulator 2019 Review
PRESENTATIONNot much good here.
The game runs like garbage on the higher graphics settings, and the loading times are long as hell.
Car Mechanic Simulator 2018 Reviews Ign
The cars and engines look decent though.Car Mechanic Simulator 2018 Review Ign
The music isn't great. It's all either royalty free junk or dubstep you've never heard of.And if you want your own music, you may as well sell your soul, because the User Radio folder only accepts music in OGG format.
And having your own music just creates a different type of annoyance.
You see, every time you leave the garage and come back, it picks up the music right where it left off instead of moving forward. And it gets really annoying. I had to turn off the radio at various points in my playthrough, because I was tired of hearing music a few words at a time.
End of the day, presentation really blows.
Car Mechanic Simulator 2018 Review
FINAL LEVELThere is none. At all.
The game ends when you decide it ends. Other than that, it goes on forever.
For me, it ended when I restored 3 cars fully.
CLOSING THOUGHTS
This game is a fun little time-waster, but with the performance issues, I wouldn't waste the money. Wait for a Steam Sale on it.
That's why my final rating for this game is a Project Car out of ten.
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