Car Quest Deluxe

TL;DR - a vehicle-based collectathon which is unfortunately linear, janky, and whose length has been excessively padded. Skip this one. The game is built around collecting 'artifacts,' various shapes that slot into the environment and cause changes that let you explore further. Unfortunately, the levels are designed in a way where changes generally occur far away, not only out of your line of sight (ignoring camera cutaways) but also often in the place you just came from. You zigzag across the map, blowing a lot of time, and it grates on you. This would make you inclined to break sequence once you have a vehicle that allows it, but the game is not designed well enough for this. You can accidentally skip two levels if you go out of sequence, forcing you to get their collectibles in new game+, starting yet another drawn-out linear playthrough. The bizarre thing is, other parts of the game seem to have no issue with breaking sequence, forcing the world to match the intended state that the furthest artifact in the sequence would result in. Other times, the developers added invisible walls or death fields to prevent you from going out of sequence. This doesn't jive with the elements o…

Ramp.

[spoiler]Car Quest[/spoiler]

This is the best video game I've ever played in my life. I love to car, I love to quest. What more can I ask? I think a partnership with MapQuest would've been good though.

I feel like seeing footage of this game or even just hearing the concept gives the wrong impression of what you're getting here. I don't mean that as like actual false-advertising, but when I see footage of an adventure game where you play as a car picking up collectibles, my mind wanders to open collectathon levels a la Banjo-Kazooie, where you're boosting around big areas fit for a car and off of ramps for sick air time, maybe with some racing levels thrown in. The concept practically writes itself... but this is not what Car Quest is. The main gameplay consists of driving across a simple path to reach a collectible, which opens up a small area somewhere else on the map to pick up another collectible, rinse and repeat. It's an agonizingly linear structure for such a big hub world, often with paths skinny enough that you'll rarely want to reach top speed, and the distance from one collectible to another often spans the entire area. And you don't get a map. By the end of the game, the paths you open up get so expansive and maze-like that I've sometimes had to look up a walkthrough just to find where I'm supposed to go (and funnily enough the guy I was watching seemed just as los…

Easily one of my favorite chill games, I love all of the details to the world and the voice actor that accompany's the entire game is quite memorable. The new additional cars are also a welcome introduction, creating more replay value even for challenge runs. There's only a few small things I disagree like adding invisible walls to places you could sequence break to previously on the switch version but I'd say it's a worthy buy, or you could wait until it goes on sale but I simply love the physics and art direction.