Parking Star 3D

Genre: Arcade / Simulation

Players: 1

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Review:

Parking Star 3D is an Arcade-style game with Simulation elements released on Nintendo 3DS in 2014. In this game, players are tasked with parking a vehicle in a designated spot as quickly as possible without bumping into anything.

The graphics here are mostly passable, using simple 2D artwork for the vehicles and backgrounds, backed by forgettable whimsical synthesized music. However, the use of stereoscopic 3D here is abysmal – not only does it make the flat images of moving cars in the game look like they’re floating above the ground, but it makes it more difficult to judge how close you are to colliding with anything. And even more oddly, this effect is not shared by anything else in the game, not even parked cars that are presumably the same general size and shape of your car. It’s like the creator of this game knew they had to toss in some 3D to justify the game’s title, but put only a minimal effort into doing so.

The gameplay isn’t quite that bad, but it’s not great, either. Players control their car somewhat realistically, meaning that left and right don’t turn your vehicle left and right, but instead turn the steering wheel left and right, so players need to judge their turning radius the same way drivers in real life do. This is of course made more complicated by the need to understand how this turning changes while you’re in reverse. Players can use either traditional gamepad controls or the touchscreen controls to do all of this, but the traditional controls seemed to work far better in my opinion.

It’s a fun way to add challenge into a tedious task turned into a videogame. Unfortunately, this doesn’t make the task any less tedious, especially when you must contend with traffic that refuses to slow down, stop, or respond in any way to your movements, as well as level geometry that can be extremely unforgiving, and parking spaces that are very picky about what counts as “in”.

As a result, Parking Star 3D is interesting as a concept, but it isn’t really all that fun. The underwhelming presentation, lazy design decisions, and somewhat unforgiving game design make this feel far too much like the chore it’s simulation, in the worst way.

tl;dr – Parking Star 3D is a game where players must steer their car to a parking spot as quickly as possible without getting into an accident. It’s not a horrible concept, but a combination of an odd and lackluster presentation and frustrating, unforgiving game design make this far too tedious to be very fun.

Grade: C-

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