High Cars

Genre: Stunt Driving / Arcade

Players: 1

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Review:

High Cars, released on Nintendo Switch in 2023, is an Arcade-style Driving Game that tasks players with navigating various stunt courses suspended in the sky. Thus, the “high” in High Cars is meant literally. Though I suppose I can’t discount the possibility that substance abuse plays some part in this too.

First, let’s get the obvious out of the way – this game has all the signs of being a shovelware asset flip. While I cannot find a store asset for this game, it seems lazily slapped-together in ways that are typical for those sorts of games. There’s no title screen here, no pause menu (or even a pause function), no clock to measure your times or high scores to beat. Everything is minimalist, and not in the good artistically-driven sort of way, but in the bare-bones “we can get away with selling this, so why bother working on it any more?” sorta’ way.

Graphically, this game presents a mix of surprisingly good and very, very bad. In the good category, the game actually has real-time shadows, with some decent lighting, and it appears that smashing head-first into an obstacle will make your car deform. In the bad, those shadows have some laughably bad pop-in, every level is suspended above a featureless bottomless pit, surrounded by a static skybox, and the level geometry is extremely simple. Oh, and as for sound, there’s no music here, and the vehicle sounds are absolutely terrible.

At this point, you may be wondering if the gameplay redeems this game, and the answer is… not really. The idea of an obstacle course driving game isn’t a bad one, but the car physics in this game are terrible – your car seems to take forever to start up and forever to brake, is terrible at taking turns, and just isn’t fun. What’s more, while some of the courses are imaginatively designed, some have you going through a bunch of tedious parts of a level before you have to complete a risky section, meaning that every time you fail you’ll have to do the tedious stuff all over again.

If you want a car game with stunts, you have better options like REKT! High Octane Stunts, and if you want a fantastic game about moving through obstacle courses, try Super Monkey Ball Banana Mania. Look, I know this game’s $1 price tag might seem tempting, but trust me when I say you’ll have far more fun saving up your money for a better game rather than playing this.

tl;dr – High Cars is an Arcade-style Driving Game where players try to drive their car through a stunt course suspended high in the air. The concept is good, and the $1 price tag is tempting, but the game seems cheaply slapped-together and the driving controls are terrible. Even at this low price, this game is not worth it.

Grade: D-

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