Car Mechanic Simulator 2014

Zach Goodier

Have you always dreamed of rolling up your sleeves, grabbing a ratchet and socket, and working on cars like granddad used to? Well, now’s your big chance, in Car Mechanic Simulator 2014, a game that lets you work in your own garage, as you are issued repair orders by clients to diagnose/fix various issues that they have with their vehicles.  From brakes, to exhaust, to starters.  This game has you fixing or replacing just about all of the components that are ever likely to go wrong on you in real life.

Make yourself at home, comes complete with soda cans.

First off, this is a fairly decent game if you want to learn a thing or two about how a car works.  It won’t serve as well as mechanic’s school, I’m 100% sure of that, but this is great if you at least want to dip your toes in to find out some of the basics of what goes into fixing your car when you take it in for servicing.  This doesn’t quite cover all of the little issues that come with late-model cars, like rusted bolts and such, but this game has some interesting moments to share, where you might actually learn a few things that can benefit you in real life.

You can get an x-ray view of what's under the bodywork to be tinkered with.

That being said, this game can be rather boring after a while, so it’s definitely not a strong candidate for binge playing.  It’s fun in small sessions, but things can feel rather tedious after a while, you know, like having the actual job of being a mechanic.  Basically, it’s get an order, perform the steps to diagnose and/or fix the problem(s), then get paid and get the next job.  Also, there isn’t a lot of variety to the vehicles you can work on, with most cars never coming close to the hot rods and supercars that likely sit on walls in garages.  There are a few hotter cars than the typical family sedans, but there isn’t all that much to wow here in terms of fancy cars or engines, all the vehicles are made by fictional companies and look about as generic as most 15-20 year old cars do.

It's handy to learn the names of parts by going through all of the engine parts and inspecting them, even if they don't need fixing. 

Think of this as a simple exercise in learning the basics of cars and automotive mechanics and tuning.  There really isn’t a lot of depth here, but it can be neat to learn a little bit about how your car works and how to find and fix the problems you will likely have if you own a vehicle.  Don’t go into this thinking it’ll be all about the fun, because the fun value starts to diminish after a fairly short amount of time.  Coming from a car family, I know that most of this game is oversimplifying things, but that doesn’t make this game not worth picking up, especially for just a few bucks.

Good

-Learning to fix brakes, drive shafts, exhausts, and other things can really be handy to have some grasp of in real life.

-Fairly accurate process to fixing realistic problems.

Bad

-Can be tedious after a relatively short time due to a lack of significant variety in cars.

-Doesn't really have all the depth of knowledge and skill needed to actually be a mechanic.

Scully Rating: 6 out of 10