WHAT THE CAR? Review

WHAT THE CAR? is a physics racing game with wacky car transformations. It has time challenges and finding secrets. No missable achievements, completion time highly depends on your skill level.

Approximate amount of time to 100%: I would guess around 15h or more but it highly depends on skill level
Estimated achievement difficulty: 6/10
Minimum number of playthroughs needed: 1
Is there a good guide available: Not yet
Multiplayer achievements: No
Missable achievements: No
Grinding Achievements: No
DLC-Only achievements: No
Speedrun achievements: Yes, you have to get the gold crown in every level
Time-gated achievements: Yes, you have to do dailies and weeklies
RNG-achievements: No
Does difficulty affect achievements: No difficulty setting
Unobtainable/glitched achievements: No

I’m amazed by how many different styles of levels and how they changed the car and the names of the levels. It has a lot of slapstick humor. You can already see this in the text on the Steam page or their website. I laughed very hard at the spoiler information on both sites.

Based on the theme of the level your car will change, and with that the controls will also slightly change. Sometimes the A button is to get more speed, sometimes you jump with A. And driving a car on 2 or 4 wheels will feel different than driving with 1 wheel. and what to think about no wheels but a bunch of spiral springs? A welcome addition to the game are the bears. I loved seeing them everywhere. Holding all kinds of signs and doing all kinds of activities. They are just so cute!

At first, I enjoyed WHAT THE CAR? a lot, but after a while, I noticed that I was playing too much in one sitting to really enjoy the humor and the content. So I recommend taking your time with the game and playing in short sittings instead of trying to complete everything as fast as possible.

The game offers some secrets to find, but most of it is just completing races to find the card in many levels, as well as getting the gold crown. Both of those will be a challenge, but the gold crown will be harder than finding all the cards. For most of the levels, it seems to be very doable to get the gold crown by practicing, but especially the skull levels will give you a challenge to reach the gold crown time.

For the achievements, you have to play each level and reach the gold crown score. You also have to find the cards in the levels that have them and find other secrets on the map. You also have to do daily challenges. Some achievements seems to unlock later than you would expect. For example, the achievements to have played every level in a chapter unlocks the next time you leave a level. So most of the time this unlocked for me when I finished the first level on the next chapter. This isn’t bad, but something to remember if you’re wondering why an achievement isn’t unlocking.

I give WHAT THE CAR? 3,5 out of 5 stars.

This review for WHAT THE CAR? was written on 7 September 2024, based on the current Steam version of the game which has 33 achievements at the time of writing this review. This information can be outdated, for example, when the developer adds or removes achievements or releases (new) DLC.