Construction Site Driver

Genre: Driving / Racing Game

Players: 1

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Review:

(Note: This game is included in the City’s Hero Collection bundle, along with Emergency Driver Simulator.)

Construction Site Driver, released on Nintendo Switch in 2021, is a game that has players driving various vehicles 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 (or sometimes simply getting to a finish line).

(Note: This game shares a lot in common with the trio of games that were in Speedster’s Collection. As such, I have copied my review for those games here, changing it based on what is different this time)

The presentation here is decent but unspectacular, with sufficient 3D visuals that get the job done, but are not noteworthy in any way. Despite this, there’s plenty of nasty pop-in and repeated slowdown too, and just overall this game is not very visually-appealing.

As for the gameplay, Construction Site Driver 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.

The game’s missions all seem to take place in the same construction site. 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 yellow gates.

Despite this game placing a focus on construction vehicles, you won’t actually be using those vehicles for construction. You won’t be raising or lowering the shovel on the earth mover, won’t be dumping cement using the cement truck, none of that. The game does make a faint attempt at using the construction theme by occasionally having you drive through boxes, but these seem like an afterthought – they don’t affect how your vehicle drives, and don’t even make noise as you go through them. They’re basically just window dressing on one of the game’s gates, that’s it.

Making things worse, 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. If this were purely a driving simulation this would make sense given the sort of vehicles you’re driving, but as this game also wants to be a racing game, this just doesn’t work. Furthermore, 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.

This game can also get a bit repetitive. Follow the gates through a different path in the same area, then park. Wash, rinse, repeat. And this repetition is made worse by the fact that you’re always doing this in the same area.

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 Construction Site Driver had some potential, it just has far too many problems to be worthwhile. The controls are bad, the graphics aren’t super impressive, and the price tag is far too high for what’s on offer. And what’s worse, if you were attracted to this game because of the construction vehicle theme, you’ll be disappointed to discover that the game doesn’t make good use of these vehicles at all. It’s just a mediocre Driving / Racing game, that’s it.

tl;dr – Construction Site Driver 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 vehicles here do not handle well, it is far too lacking in options and content for its price, and it makes poor use of its construction vehicle theme. Skip it.

Grade: C-

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