Super Toy Cars Offroad
Review
No accessories required…
by Dan Lenois
reviewed on PC
No accessories required…
There’s always been something remarkably charming about playing as miniature cars in videogame form. Since most of us playing these games can’t physically go back to that time where we might’ve avidly collected miniature cars by the dozens, hundreds, or thousands, several videogame franchises have, over time, stepped in to fulfil that simple but deep-seated desire in virtual form. While Hot Wheels Unleashed is currently the go-to mainstream AAA-scale game, that doesn’t rule out other smaller developers from getting in on the action too. Super Car Toys Offroad is the third and most recent instalment in the Super Car Toys series, and was developed and published by Eclipse Games
License to kill, not to break the traffic laws
In any other cartoony car racing game, the ability to ram and destroy other people or AI’s cars can definitely prove more than satisfying, as anyone who’s ever played a single match of Rocket League can readily attest. But in Super Car Toys Offroad, the only one you’ll probably be tempted to destroy is yourself.
The UI in Super Car Toys Offroad is abysmal, as is the camera, which seems to take a definite fiendish delight in trying to obscure the player’s view as much as possible wherever possible. The track ahead is taking a sharp curved right turn? Ok, let’s have the camera pan itself to the left, so you can barely see anything in front of you. Even your own on-screen car model is only partially visible through the obscurities caused by the inept perspective changes. It’s bad enough to play a game where the UI does a poor job of communicating its information to the player. Having a UI that appears to inadvertently actively harming the player’s odds of success is far less excusable, especially when the game provides little to no opportunity to disable parts of the HUD in order to at least try to minimize its hindrance of the gameplay.
Winning requires you to float like a Cadillac, and sting like a Beemer
Even if the player somehow manages to overcome both all the intended and unintended obstacles inherent to the game’s design, and "wins" the game by crossing the finish line ahead of everyone else, and is awarded with the winning screen, there is a significant and horrible gameplay bug where, if another player or NPC had launched a projectile at your vehicle before they crushed the finished line, even if you had already finished yourself, and their projectile hits you as you look at the endgame stat screen, that "victory" will be automatically reversed by the game and counted as a loss. And given how often projectiles are launched, and how often cars crash into other cars, this will likely not be a one-off issue for many players.
Another area that proves outright confounding in terms of its implementation is the main menu. Clearly, while the in-game racing controls have been optimized for both keyboard and controller, the same cannot be said for the main menu. Instead of being able to use their mouse or WASD keyboard controls to navigate the menu, along with using either the spacebar or Enter key to select menu items, the player can only exclusively rely on the arrow keys and Enter. None of this is directly communicated to the player, which can cause confusion and subsequently frustration, unless you knew this going in.
The longer I continued to force myself through this game, the more it became clear to me that while the developers had done at least a moderately good job of ensuring the game’s visual fidelity was up to snuff, and that the player had a wide assortment of content, in the forms of cars and tracks, they never bothered to do even the remotest quality assurance testing. Super Car Toys Offroad is digital living proof of the old adage of choosing quantity over quality.
It is theoretically possible that some of the issues mentioned here could be addressed, in some capacity, by the developers, but the amount of overhauling required to fully fix this confused and stumbling mess of a game is likely far greater than the effort this team of developers will realistically commit to. In their enthusiasm to race to the finish line, they produced a game that crashed and burned at launch. One can only hope that the developers take a few notes as they survey this smouldering heap of a game.
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4.5
fun score
Pros
Visuals are fine, and there is a wide assortment of content
Cons
Camera and UI is frustrating
