Recent reviews by otisgreggusgringleton

must-play if you like survival games with good base building and exploration.

very unique premise and good horror elements- it's short but it will keep you playing until the end

fun, addictive, wholesome, good with friends, and lets you play bangers on guitar

the good
-i absolutely love the art style. very colorful and pleasing to look at.

-atmospheric and fitting ambient music

-the car is a 70s/80s boxy american land yacht and i really appreciate seeing love for these cars.

-great characters and really fleshed out lore. i appreciate the time that went into writing all the little codex entries.

-fun nods to the stalker series (i'm a big stalker fan)

-somehow very addictive despite its shortcomings

the bad

-i can't recommend this to anyone not able to do two-hour sessions (minimum) every time they play because the devs decided to double down on forcing an extremely harsh save system. you can't save outside your garage. if you have to do something urgent irl while outside the garage, you either have to pause the game (potentially leaving the computer on for hours) or lose all progress. this is absolutely disrespectful to the player's time and i am confused as to why the devs refuse to change this.

-the car customization/upgrade/repair system feels very dumbed down. half the game is about upgrading and taking care of this car but you only get to swap out exterior parts, paint the car, and apply decals. if something goes wrong, you just use a repair kit for that specific problem and it is instantly fixed. repairs do not feel interesting or fun, just a chore as punishment for damaging the car. it would be a lot more fun if you could replace, repair, or tune specific parts of the car like the exhaust, valves, carburetor, dampers, etc. i love the paint and decal system but a lot of the paintable parts don't have enough paintable surface area so your paint job and decals end up being obscured by the non-paintable details (and rust) on the part. for example, the lead-plated panels are covered in lead plates that don't change color with paint and obscure any decals you apply. the consequence of this is a very odd and unappealing (in my opinion) look.

-the driving is lackluster. you probably spend more time out of the car than in it. you drive for about 15 seconds, then get out, grab loot and/or repair, then get back in. it starts to feel like a chore. because you are constantly avoiding anomalies and stopping for fuel, repairs, or loot, you seldom actually go fast. it's a car game- i want to go fast! the car sounds like a muffled vacuum cleaner no matter what kind of engine is under the hood (would be way cooler if the non-stock engines had cooler sounds unique to that specific engine). you have to give up an ability slot just to use the handbrake to drift; there's no keybind just for the handbrake.

-the ambient music is okay but the radio lacks a custom user music feature so if you get bored of the radio music then you have to either play background music, not use the radio, or go through an unnecessarily long and tedious procedure involving modding your own music files into the game (this requires third-party software).

-the gameplay loop can get stale. it's mostly just driving to specific locations on the map, opening boxes with crafting materials inside them and taking the loot back to the car, and getting the anchors when you're done with the level. once you are done with a run, you unlock new craftable items or garage upgrades, repair/upgrade/paint/refuel your car, make items that you need for the next trip, and read new codex entries.

-there are bugs. this includes softlocks (i think they patched most of them out but i wouldn't be surprised), items being deleted, consumable items not losing durability upon use, and inventory ui behaving as if you were constantly clicking on random things. this game came out six months before i wrote this review; the bugs i experienced really should have been patched before release, especially the softlocks.

-there are lots of annoying little things that just eat away at fun. when one of your car batteries dies/swells, it makes an insufferably loud looping electrical-shorting sound effect that doesn't stop until you replace the battery, stow it in storage, or recycle it. the abductor and pickpocket anomalies are utter nuisances that make me want to rip my face off in frustration. they are not fun, just irritating. eventually all body panels will become "fragile" no matter how much you repair them and you will need to either deal with that or make a new one. if you want to have more lights on your car, you have to use up accessory slots which means less storage, fuel/electricity, or protection. there is also a pointer on the hud that shows your distance from the car and what direction it is in, rendering the light accessories completely non-viable. at some point, you will unlock a basketball minigame for the garage. the basketball is an item that cannot be stowed in storage, nor can it be recycled. there is also a machine that vacuums up loose items in the garage. i almost never use it because it sucks up the basketball with everything else and then plays an annoying alarm until you take the basketball out of it. it is a very small nitpick but it is extremely irritating to me that the auto-vac doesn't just not suck up the basketball. plus, i never bother shooting hoops with the ball anyway so why can't i just put the damn thing in a locker???

-optimization is atrociously bad for a game this low-poly. do not play if you have a bad computer; i had to look up guides on what settings to use. my computer costs at least $2000 in total and i was having frame problems. plus, there are no good anti-aliasing options- it's TAA or FXAA only, which is not uncommon for games these days but i personally think games should look like 1440p if you set the resolution to 1440p and want anti-aliasing; i would rather be able to see things without eye strain than have a blur filter constantly applied to my game that halves the resolution.

conclusion
i realize that i went into a lot more detail about the bad than the good, but if you can get past the problems i described, it really is a wonderful game and i do recommend it.

fun bitesize cookie-clicker clone for space nerds (bongbongbongbongbongbongbongbong)

great postal game, great quake-style shooter.

maybe a bit rough around the edges but the devs do care and it is certainly a worthy sequel

underrated gem; play it and maybe it will achieve the popularity it deserves after several years of full release (it is a CRIME that there's usually only one populated server at any time)

My Garage is a wonderful concept, but the developer refuses to properly optimize or polish the game and seems focused on quantity over quality. Nearly everything that isn't a car part is from a Unity asset library; the game feels like a polished asset flip. The lack of care put into the game's assets is evident in the sound design as well as the art style. If you break something on your car, you will hear a loud bang. It WILL jumpscare you. I was also jumpscared by the voiced dialogue the first time I heard it. Plus, the engine sounds for the cars are incredibly annoying, especially the V8 and diesel I6 sounds. As for the art style, textures are either super-low or super-high detail which makes the game look, to put it bluntly, awful. The lighting looks generic as well (I assume it's a Unity preset of some kind). There is no effort put in to make it any less obvious how many models in My Garage were NOT made by the developer. Assuming you disregard this review, you will be playing My Garage because of the gameplay, not the graphics or sound design.

The optimization, as I implied at the beginning of the review, is abhorrent. According to another reviewer, the developer has stated up-front that they are not going to bother much with optimizing the code or the graphics because the game has a high price which would discourage poorer people without powerful computers from buying it. If you know anything about game design or programming then you probably see the problems with that approach. To be fair, I don't know how true that review was, but I'm inclined to believe it based on the awful frame rates I experienced, the hideous graphics, and the frequent content updates. My computer is relatively powerful (RTX 3070, Ryzen 5 3600, 32 GB DDR4, game loaded from an SSD) and I don't know if I EVER got consistent 60+ FPS when I played this game. Good luck having good frame rates on cheaper computers. The save files get so big that the game doesn't support Steam Cloud saves, so if you uninstall the game without backing up saves, all of your progress is gone. To put a Band-Aid on the optimization issues, you can store cars and car parts in a asset-library-grabbed warehouse, which helps a little bit but not enough considering how ugly the graphics are.

The map is huge but lacks detail; the most interesting thing you will come across is a rusty junk car chassis, a sellable collectible item that will disappear upon reloading of the save file, or a gas station where you can buy food, tools, fuel, or engine fluids. Most of the time, if you look away from the road, you will see nothing but a ton of hideous asset-flipped trees or some hills in the distance that should be covered with trees but aren't because of the draw distance. You can turn off trees for performance, but then the game looks even weirder. The roads are nice and winding with the occasional long straightaway, which is perfect for driving fast in a car, but because of the way the vehicles behave (more on that later), they just serve to test how long you can go without ruining the car you just spent hours assembling, fixing, upgrading, and customizing.

The cars are very fun to build and customize but the gameplay gets pretty repetitive after a while; it feels rather padded. For example, you need to make in-game money to obtain items and cars, but only some of the jobs are worth doing because the payout varies for each job. Once you know which jobs are worthwhile, it is a matter of spamming the "skip" button until you see the description for the right job. You end up just doing the same few jobs over and over again just to grind for money to buy parts or used cars. There is a survival system, but I never played with it on and frankly, it seems completely unnecessary considering the fact that this is a car game; it's there for the sake of unnecessary realism. You will eventually need to both weld together and cut off car parts, but for some reason you have to refill the welder and grinder after just a few welds/grinds. You have to buy new electrodes and discs for the grinder at a store, which is boring and disrupts the gameplay loop. If you so much as tap a wall while driving, your car will be damaged. This is obscenely frustrating considering how long it takes to repair even a small dent. Almost every car part has a wear system, but it's not always easy (and sometimes impossible) to tell whenever a part needs replacing. This is made worse by the fact that part wear goes by percentages and not levels. A 100% part will look the same as a 99% part, but the 99% part works slightly worse than the 100% part. Some broken parts even look the same as parts that are about to break but still work. To compound this, as long as you drive your car, its parts will wear, so all your hard work will slowly be undone no matter what you do. There is an in-game shop that you have to drive all the way across the map to get to, which isn't fun at all (more about driving later). One last notable instance of gameplay padding is the accumulation of ugly yellow dust on your car, which will happen if you drive on dirt roads, which there are a lot of. You have to hose it off manually and it takes way too long to do.

In a car game, even one focused primarily on working on cars rather than driving them, you are going to want the cars to feel fun to drive. My Garage cars handle worse than cars in Garry's Mod. It's like trying to steer a brick. I wouldn't be surprised if the bad handling was intentional just to further pad out the repetitive gameplay; you're going to end up crashing at some point because of how hard to steer these cars are. It doesn't help that worn tires or suspension parts prevent cars from driving straight. If you make your car fast through upgrades, the transmission will bottom out at the highest gear, effectively making big horsepower a novelty or even a burden on your handling. This is especially a problem because there is no transmission in My Garage that has more than five gears.

There is obviously a lot of jank as well. Painting a car involves actually taking a spray can and filling in every last pixel of bodywork with the color you want. The spray cans run out, which is annoying. The paintable parts have a lot of places which are incredibly difficult to paint because they are hard to access; sometimes you will find yourself aiming the can every which way, wasting money while you try to find the spot you need to aim at in order to finish painting the part. Surface rust removal and car washing both work the same as paint, which is even more annoying. The buildings often have deceptive collisions; for example the walls inside the warehouse do not align with the collision boxes. The player movement is atrociously bad- you can climb mountains without effort, no matter how steep, but good luck jumping on top of your own car; the player sticks to the ground like glue. The English text (I can't say anything about other languages) in-game reads as if a 7-year-old wrote it. For example, the job descriptions say things like "Someone said pistons are bad" or "can you mend shock absorbers?". This wouldn't be a problem if the rest of the game wasn't so problematic, but the game is indeed that problematic and the lack of well-written text says a lot about just how problematic it is.

One last note: the community is very immature and even kind of racist; multiple talented modders have abandoned modding for My Garage because they didn't like the community. People got in my face because I asked why Confederate battle flag decal mods (like stylized ones, not just General Lee roof decals) should be allowed on the Nexus page considering how that's, you know, a racist symbol...

if you ever wanted to be neo at the ending fight scene in the matrix, this is your game (play it)