Game: Car Dealership Simulator
Developer: Quadfix Games
Genre: Simulation
Releases: 2022 (PC)
Over the course of the simulator-themed week here on Cubic Creativity, I have sometimes been rather harsh in some of my criticism. There are probably people out there having a good time with “Lawn Mowing Simulator” and I am sure that helping cute animals restoring their homes is enough of a reason for some players to buy “Fresh Start Cleaning Simulator”. However, in my opinion there has to be some standard to go by, else all of the reviews I have done so far are basically null and void. My expectations differ from genre to genre, but in a simulation game I would put the emphasis on the gameplay loop. The question of whether tasks are fun and/or relaxing is a major part of my rating, since without either fun to drive me forward or the often-mentioned zen-like relaxation part there is no bloody point in playing these games. Which brings us to “Car Dealership Simulator”, a game that offers … well, nothing at all and therefore makes everything I have reviewed during this week so far look stellar in comparison.
Right after we start the game, we get what little story there is to tell: The father of the player character has retired and left his car dealership for us to manage. Apparently, he left after selling basically everything, since all that is left are the buildings, some furniture and a starting capital of 250,000 TL. Now, TL might sound like a fantasy currency, but evidence points at it being Turkish Lira, which at the point of writing the article would have been around 12,000 Euros. Clicking “Next” shows another box full of important information, which I just included down below to give you an idea of what a game we are talking about here:
I gleefully enjoy reading sentences like “When you improve your car dealer, new parking spaces are opened”. I mean, I get what it is trying to tell me, but grammar this bad certainly leaves me worried for the game that inevitably follows after I click the start button. And that is not the only place in which the English translation was more than lacking: The title screen is full of typos, with examples ranging from simple stuff like “Early Acces Note” to the admittedly funny sentence “Save file may be broke when the update”. The poor save file, lost all its money after the game got updated, probably in some freak Y2K-esque billing accident. Let’s hope that we get enough “Custumers” to support it financially. Even the Steam store page for the game has not been proof-read, since it contains pearls like “Every customer comes with different pricing, don’t sell your car now and don’t miss the next deals!!”, which, again, is a sentence that I can understand the meaning of; but that does not mean that it is not terrible.
However, I have played games with terrible machine translation before that I managed to like despite the non-sensical gibberish that was the dialogue. So, what do you do in “Car Dealership Simulator”? Well, since you do not have nearly enough money to even have one car to sell, you need to work the facilities that your car dealership comes with. Once you have figured out that you need to sit at your desk and click a button at the upper-left corner to open your business for customers, you only have to wait a brief moment for the first car to materialize in one of the buildings. Unlike in games like “Gas Station Simulator” where you can see customers entering the premises, “Car Dealership Simulator” just flips a switch to spawn them, and automatically despawns them once you finished the task. Being “done” with them depends on the facility though: You can clean cars at the car wash, you can sand them down (the reason for which eludes me as someone with little knowledge about car maintenance), or you can change the tires.
If this sounds like “Gas Station Simulator”-esque tasks to you, I would agree. However, there is one big difference between those games. In “Gas Station Simulator”, you have clear instructions of what to do, with highlighted areas to show you what needs to be done. In “Car Dealership Simulator”, the developers did not bother with such luxuries and simply refuse to give you any directions in form of a tutorial. In practice, that meant that I was able to find out how to wash cars, even though the task makes little sense once you think about it. The car always seems clean but has a few branches stuck at the front window. You therefore have to drown those in soap until you cannot see them anymore, then switch to the power washer and spew water at the car until both the soap and the color of the car go away. Infuriatingly enough, you cannot even switch between the soap and the washer nozzle by pressing the item keys. If you have one item out and want to use another one, you first have to click the button for the item you are currently holding to put it away, then press the item key for the other item to take it out.
The game is full of those silly details that could be easily fixed and should be apparent to any tester rightaway. The walking speed is incredibly slow, which means that you should constantly hold the run key to get anywhere without wasting too much time. When trying to leave the PC window in the game via Esc, you are stuck in the chair and have to press E again to free yourself. I have yet to find out how to switch tires; the car was at the right height, but pressing the E key as the game tells me does nothing and none of the tools at my disposal work. And then there are the food and drink meters. Why exactly do I need to take care of my characters calorie intake in a game that simulates a car dealership? By the way, I waited until my character had a zero in water intake, and nothing happened which makes the introduction of such a feature even more questionable. Worse even: You can make tea, but one cup only fills like fifteen points of that bar. Does the developer honestly believe that I have nothing better to do than constantly running to the kettle in order to refill a stat that has no purpose? Only then I realized that your walking and running speed are tied to those stats, which means that you have to do that mindless refilling in order to get anywhere. And lastly, it costs money to use those things, which is even more asinine.
And the core idea of selling cars? Well, forget it! I can only dream of buying cars: The car washing “mini-game” only gives me 500 TL, but cars can easily cost 1,000,000 TL and therefore need hours of stupid car washing before I can even dream of putting a car into one of the parking spaces. There is no sensible gameplay loop here, because you do unfun busywork right from the start without any change of getting out of that hole in the first few hours. And assuming you finally get enough money to buy a car to sell it to some other schmuck, you then simply accrue more money in this ugly and unfinished car crash. I am aware of the fact that “Car Dealership Simulator” is an Early Access title, but Early Access does not mean throwing out garbage and fending off any criticism automatically because you can argue that the title is not finished yet. For anyone interested, “Car Dealership Simulator” is available on Steam for 8.19€, but I cannot see what drastic changes they would have to undertake to make this even just a decent game.
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