Cars 2

I’m not sure why I went back to Cars 2 but it was a good feeling to clear off another one of the games I started in 2018. Apparently, I’m still trying to clear all the movie tie-in games despite the fact I hate them. Or maybe I‘m searching in vain to find the only good one? Which I won’t because apparently that is Spiderman 2 for the Playstaton 2.

 

Cars 2 isn’t a true movie tie in. It just uses the framing of the Cars franchise to create a loose Mario Kart rip-off. There is a career mode of sorts where you play through an assortment of different game modes that revolve around either using weapons against AI or racing against AI… or racing against the clock while using weapons against the AI.

 

The problem with using Cars as a framing device is that all of the characters are incredibly irritating. I suppose it’s worth considering that I’m not the target audience for Cars however, this is where game difficulty doesn’t make a lot of sense. I think I’ve mentioned this before but when the subject material is targeted at children, the gameplay should match it and while Cars isn’t Dark Souls on the scale of difficulty, it’s certainly not easy to the level of its target audience.  Typically, as soon as children are stuck on a level, they will stop playing and I imagine this would happen at some point soon after the tutorial. So why would you make a game this long if it’s not going to be played the whole way through?

 

Focussing on the annoyance of the interludes between gameplay, the attempts at framing the story around Cars 2 (the whole secret agent thing), is totally pointless here and makes no sense when you factor in the fact that you can select any character to do any race. It’s as flawed as it is unnecessary.

 

Turning to the gameplay itself, there are a limited selection of weapons and it suffers from the AI’s ability to continuously avoid obstacles and hit you with everything they pick up. Racing is equally as frustrating because when there are no weapon items, it’s basically a case of maximising the drift capabilities of your car to gain speed boosts and picking up speed power ups. However, if you aren’t in first, you won’t get any of these because the AI hoovers them up even on easy difficulty. I think what I’m trying to say is that the gameplay is unbalanced in favour of the AI, however it counter balances this by having them not get too far ahead of you by deliberately holding back. This isn’t levelling the playing field, it’s poor and lazy game design.

 

The arena battles are another area of frustration and the Hunter Mode is a perfect example of crappy gameplay. Having to steer and line up weapon shots in a fully explorable environment rather than a circuit race just highlights more poor game design and horrible balancing. Again, the AI has laser aim and will hit you with everything, more often than not a split second before you fire off your own weapon.

 

Sound wise, along with the terrible annoying voice overs, the music is equally as galling where it takes the cartoony approach of being continuously upbeat when it the end, all this does is make the entire experience depressing.

 

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 50 Achievements

 

While the achievement list boasts 50 achievements, in reality it’s 49 as it’s carrying a ‘get all the other achievements’ achievement, which I can only imagine is because they ported the list from the PS4’s trophy system.

 

Anyway, the vast majority of them involve doing races and events and completing the main campaign, from which the main the goal is to finish at least 3^rd in every event. Doing so is required for one of the main achievements and this is frankly a relief because the AI gets some shitty advantages in the latter part of the game. In races, they get speed boosts out of nowhere and if you are in 4^th or 5^th going into the final lap, you may as well quit because even if you get close to 3^rd, the AI will get a normal missile pick up that will hit you with laser guided precision. I’m all for having a competitive game but let the entire field be competitive. If you’re in third on the last lap, you don’t fire a missile backwards to consolidate your position if the guy in 2^nd is right in front of you. It’s frankly ridiculous.

 

Aside from finishing the events, there’s quite a bit of miscellaneous stuff the game wants you to do. One of the more notable ones involves getting 40 quick starts. These can only be done in regular and battle races and they are very picky about awarding them to you. Essentially, you have to rev the engine by hammering the right trigger but you have to start at the earliest opportunity and keeping going until the green light. Doing this in one sitting by repeatedly restarting an event will result in wanker’s cramp.

 

There’s a lot of rewards for using specific weapons and doing certain things in certain events but thankfully a lot of this can be done by using two controllers. In fact, there are six achievements tied to playing the multiplayer game modes, Disruptor and Arena mode and both are mini grinds.

 

Again, there are loads of other repeatable action achievements but none are worth mentioning as they are fairly easy and just take a bit of time. There is, however a totally nonsensical achievement for collecting shit in a racing game. I hate it when they do this, it’s contrary to the point of the game and the only way to get some of the hidden collectibles is to not compete in the actual race event taking place. One of them was so obscure that I was there for about 20 minutes trying to get the stupid jumps right while watching my opponents complete their 7^th or 8^th victory lap.

 

Downloadable Content – N/A

 

Cars 2 is a boring completion but at least it was a free Games with Gold title. It’s not overly long and can be grinded through in less than 10 hours but to honest, it will feel like longer and there are better uses of your time. Such as drinking bleach. With razor blades in it.