What the Car?
Year: 2023
Rating: E
Time Played: ~5 hours
By this point, I expect a certain amount of silliness from the What the… series of games. From the highly referential humor of What the Golf? to the awkward control scheme of What the Bat?, I expected something ridiculous with What the Car? As half a racing game and half a platformer, What the Car? has tons of puns (a staple of the series) but lacks a little in the finesse of its controls.
The standard set of levels in What the Car? have particular themes that then play off the unique movement style of the car. This was quite similar to some of the gameplay mechanics in What the Golf? There were also levels with greater challenges and, of course, each level had its own collectables and goal times to meet for a bronze, silver, or gold ranking. Casually playing through the whole thing didn’t take too long, but I suspect that’s why the game also heavily emphasized playing user-submitted levels as well as the ones provided by the original developers.
While I understand the quirky nature of the What the… games, the one thing that keeps coming back as a flaw is how difficult they are to control. I started playing this game on my iPhone on Apple Arcade, but pretty quickly had to add in a Bluetooth controller so I could complete the levels, and even that wasn’t a guarantee. Having checkpoints on some of the longer levels would also have been appreciated since I’d sometimes get all the way close to the end and fail the level and need to do the whole thing again. Still, it’s a quirky game and if you like the other What the… games, you’ll probably like this one.
A quirky racing platformer with somewhat difficult controls, I give What the Car? 3.5 stars out of 5.
1/2
