Developer: Ultimate Games
Publisher: Ultimate Games
Platform: Switch
Tested on: Switch
Car Trader – Review
Cars are essential in everyone’s life, especially if you live somewhere remote, this is the way to travel. Buying a car can be a hassle if you have specific demands and some can be very pricy. With a good knowledge about vehicles you might think that you will have an edge in a game about flipping rides, but you are wrong. Car Trader is all about making a living off our four-wheeled companions, but the whole ordeal is rather terrible.
Story
You are a car flipper that starts out with 10.000 dollar in the bank and must make a good living buying and selling cars. With a parking lot at your disposal and a few mechanics near the auction house, you have everything needed to do your job. Unfortunately, there isn’t any story presented in the game. You just get dropped with a quick word of advice and that’s it. No background, nothing, but as the game looks like an arcade game, it isn’t really missed.
Graphics
Car Trader looks very simply made, the user interface is simple with only a few buttons to press. Vehicles are all derived from real-life counterparts and it seems that the developer just took images from some kind of insurance or auction site that sells wrecked cars to make this game. Logos have been removed from the vehicles and names are altered for the sake of copyright. Each ride will have multiple photos indicating damages and when you are bidding, pictures of real people are shown. What is most frustrating is that while the pictures of the cars are all in decent quality, the photos of the people are so pixilated that you can count the pixels on their face.
Sound
The graphics are boring and the sounds definitely match. This one menu song keeps on looping and looping. It seems to be made in a few minutes and gets old fast. There is only one word of spoken dialogue in the game and that is the auctioneer saying “sold”. Sound effects are as bland as the pictures of your opposing bidders, so don’t expect something enjoyable to listen to.
Gameplay
Car Trader is a game all about flipping cars. You start the game with buying your first car and as this is a tutorial, you will automatically win the auction, after which you get instructed to fix it up and sell it again. The game has basically three stages: purchasing, repairing and selling. As you only buy wrecks from the local insurance company, you will have to buy cheap, check out what’s wanted in the market and sell them for a great profit. This is where the first issue arises. While vehicles have a condition indicator to tell you in what state they currently are, it seems that there is no real difference between a total loss and a brand-new car. As pictures are all the same, it feels cheap and not really reasonable to have a 100% car with the complete front smashed in. Since fixing the vehicle has no influence on the state and look, it feels that you are selling the same wreck back to the competition.
The game says that popular models will change depending on the market, but nothing of this was noticed while reviewing the game. Fixing up cars is done by shops and their quality is measured by how much it costs. Selling cars in great shape doesn’t really yield that much profit as you will slowly see your finances drop. While bidding is an intense thing and can lead to many people having auction fever, this game doesn’t induce it. If you played Car Mechanic Simulator, you know how unpredictable the auctions are, but in this game 7/10 you can predict when you have the winning bid.
With no true indicator about how you are doing and almost always having to buy cars for more than they are worth, chances are high that you will delete the game after only a few minutes and will ask for a refund. Not only is everything bad and boring, controlling the game is a nightmare. The user interface might be simple but doesn’t work great at all. The developers might have been better off to implement a cursor instead of badly working buttons.
Conclusion
Car Trader could have been a fun little game but because it’s so badly made, it won’t keep your attention for long. Even with the right cars, it is hard to gain any funds and fixing them seems to not really increase the value or make them wanted more on the market. Graphics are just real pictures without any change at all and with the limited content, this title is better avoided than tried.
Car Trader – Review,
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