Car Driver Ultimate

Genre: Driving / Racing Game

Players: 1

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Review:

(Note: This game is included in the Speedster’s Collection bundle, along with Sports Car Driver and Super Car Driver)

The generically-titled Car Driver Ultimate, released on Nintendo Switch in 2022, is a game that has players driving various cars in a Simulation-style game that tasks you with getting through a series of checkpoints and then parking in a designated spot as fast as you can without colliding with too many obstacles.

(Note: This game shares a lot in common with Sports Car Driver and Super Car Driver, including all three games having many of the same assets. As such, I have copied my review for both games here, changing it based on what is different between them)

The presentation here is decent but unspectacular, with sufficient 3D visuals that get the job done, but not especially well. There’s plenty of nasty pop-in and repeated slowdown too, as well as some odd design choices like making some roads and even large stretches of airport runway bright purple. Weird. Even on the Nintendo Switch, Racing games have demonstrated they’re capable of much more than this. The sound here is sufficient enough at least, and having occasional noises of planes taking off is a nice touch. However, there’s no music to speak of.

As for the gameplay, Car Driver Ultimate is an odd halfway point between a Driving Simulation and a Racing game. There aren’t any other racers here – your only real enemy is the ticking clock and a damage meter that depletes with each collision. There are other cars on the roads in this game, but they act as obstacles rather than opponents.

The game’s missions all seem to take place within the same area surrounding an airport with a nearby racetrack and a parking garage. In a typical level of the game, you’ll be going through one of various routes through this area, guided in how you’re expecting to navigate by the presence of translucent blue gates.

Compared to both Sports Car Driver and Super Car Driver, I feel like this game’s locale finds the best balance of long stretches of road to cut loose on, as well as enough visually-interesting stuff in the area to keep it from getting samey too quickly, although it does get repetitive before too long. You’ll be going back and forth between high-speed stretches of road and places where you’ll want to slow down to navigate more tricky areas. I’d ultimately still argue that this game definitely leans in favor of the Driving Simulation side of things, though.

However, this game’s controls are just terrible. Your vehicles’ turning radius is restrictive, the brakes take far too long to kick in, and just overall everything here is far too stiff and clunky to be enjoyable. Also, this game makes the odd choice to make players manually switch to reverse instead of just making it tied to brake. This can make three-point turns particularly annoying.

What’s more, as I noted a moment ago, this game gets extremely repetitive very quickly. Follow the gates through a different path in the same area, then park (or sometimes be told to park in reverse). Wash, rinse, repeat. And what’s even more frustrating is that these routes are often completely arbitrary. You’ll be instructed to perform figure 8s in parking lots and take labyrinthine routes for no reason. It’s pointless to try to make sense out of the route you’re taking because there usually isn’t any sense to be found, and you’re not looking at a route, just a series of gates.

Another frustrating element here is that the traffic in these levels isn’t scripted, meaning that you could end up getting a worse time in a level simply because the traffic was different in this run than it was in the last one.

Finally, this game’s $14 standard price is a joke, because this doesn’t even feel like a full game. It’s far too repetitive and simple, there’s no multiplayer, and I just cannot see most players enjoying this game for more than a few minutes before putting it down forever. Of course, we all know that $14 price tag is just a placeholder to make the game seem like a really good deal when it frequently goes on sale, but the bottom-of-the-barrel $2 price tag really seems like it should have been this game’s normal price, especially since this developer is re-using assets across multiple games.

In the end, while Car Driver Ultimate had some potential, and I believe it is overall a better game than Sports Car Driver and Super Car Driver, it still just has far too many problems to be worthwhile. The controls are bad, the graphics aren’t super impressive, the gameplay is repetitive, and the price tag is far too high for what’s on offer. Maybe you’ll enjoy this game just enough to make it worthwhile if you get it on sale for $2, but you have far better choices on Nintendo Switch.

tl;dr – Car Driver Ultimate is a game that mixes elements of Driving Simulation and Racing games, with a focus mainly on the Driving Simulation side of things. Unfortunately, the cars here do not handle well, the game is highly repetitive, and it is far too lacking in options and contents for its price. This is a better game than both other games in the series, Sports Car Driver and Super Car Driver, but that’s nor saying much.

Grade: C-

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