A 3 minute review of Car Trader Simulator by 3 Minute Game Reviews – Game Reviews Without The Fluff…

Car Trader Simulator is a game that I was quite excited to play after enjoying games like Production Line and Car Tycoon in the past, but it quickly became obvious that it’s nothing like those games and unfortunately not in a good way.

You take on the role of an ex-criminal turned car salesman with the goal of buying old, usually damaged cars, fixing them up and selling them on for a profit, which on paper sounds like it could be pretty interesting, but they’ve managed to make it the most boring experience I’ve had in ages.

The whole game consists of staring at a static map of a town which shows certain services scattered around that you can interact with like the scrap yard, your headquarters, your garage, car dealerships and so on. You have to micro manage each and every one of your staff every time you want to pick up a recently purchased car or collect the random reputation boosts that appear across the map.

You also have to manually assign a mechanic to each and every car you buy in order to repair it or change its colour, which is almost entirely pointless by the way since customers seem to buy pretty much anything in any colour anyway. It gets trepetitive very quickly.

To the left of the map you’ve got an auction window where car auctions pop up ever few seconds and winning an auction against competing bidders consists of nothing more than spamming bid until everyone else gives up. It doesn’t really seem to matter how much you buy each car for since you can easily sell them at a profit anyway.

In the lower right corner is your phone which is constantly lighting up with potential customers looking to buy a car, and you just have to vaguely match their interests with a car you have available. Maybe I just got lucky but even when a customer said they wanted a Blue SUV I was still able to sell them a Red Sedan at a profit without much trouble.

Before I forget I should mention that not only can you sell cars in a showroom or over the phone, but there’s also a couple of in-game websites where you can see your cars and you’ll recieve offers from people interested almost instantly even if you put it up at a fairly high price.

One of the websites is similar to Ebay and the other is straight up called Dark Cars which is supposed to be, well a dark market for cars.

Honestly the pictures they’ve used for each car are very clearly just real life images of random peoples cars from auction sites or maybe even google images, with the registration plates edited out and some cars have been painted over and it all just ends up looking really cheap.

They’ve tried to spice things up abit by giving the player the choice of being a legal businessman or a shady dealer, and you’ll occasionally get a pop up with some story dialogue featuring some horribly cliche characters taken straight from a B movie, and you’re often given a couple of response options that either increase or decrease your legality and reputation.

The written dialogue and voice acting is beyond bad, and the sound effects consist of a few plings here and there, a telephone ringing and the generic sound of a cash register whenever you buy or sell something.

On the plus side it runs great though that’s hardly surprising given that there’s basically no graphics at all with exception to some rain effects overlayed ontop of the map.

The whole game plays like a failed phone game and although it’s cheap at only 9.99 on Steam, in my opinion it’s still too expensive for what it is and I couldn’t play it for longer than a couple of hours before I just couldn’t take anymore. I normally try not to judge Early Access games until they’re finished but this is one I won’t be going back to.

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