Thoughts About Cars

Kachow!

McQueen

I’ll hand it to Disney / Pixar as far as Car’s story is concerned. They tried something different. While most movie license games will have you play through the events of the movie, Cars takes place after the movie. The story (while not up to Disney / Pixar’s usually standards) is a cute addition to the Cars cannon. While it is cute there isn’t much there in the way of substance… it isn’t Cars 2. The story is most likely overly simple cause nobody is playing a Cars game to see a story. They play to race.

Get Real Gone

Cast as Lightnight McQueen, race you will. The game consists of racing around radiator springs winning races to earn trophy points. When you earn enough trophy points you unlock more Nascar type races. The races are fun. Easy enough for a non racing fan like myself to get into, but not so easy that I didn’t feel like there isn’t a challenge. Racing around Radiator Spring is made fun by the additional controls given to McQueen, such as the ability to jump of chasms and use boost speeds to kick yourself into heigh gear. Racing in the Nascar type tracks was really just… boring. Drive fast, turn left. Rinse, repeat.

Mini games like Tractor Tippin’ with ‘Mater were a hoot and surprised me with how well they broke up the monotony of otherwise a game that just throws race after race at you. There is even the obligatory platforming “find-the-items” type meta game through the main game. In this case, Lizzie has McQueen looking for 20 postcards and some of them are insanely difficult postcards to find. I had to use the internet to track down a few of them.

Drive Fast, Turn Left

Technically speaking, I encountered a few bugs in the game that there is no excuse for in this generation of consoles. Invisible walls and glitches that freeze that game have no place on an Xbox 360.

Find Yourself

There really isn’t anything here for hard-core serious gamers. Fans of racing games will be put off by the simplicities of the racing dynamic and fans of other Disney typical platform games might find themselves sick of all the racing. In the end it took me about 6 hours to complete and I’d say I enjoyed myslef. I’ll give Cars a 5/10.