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You Suck At Parking

Platform(s): Nintendo Switch, PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X
Genre: Racing
Developer: Happy Volcano
Release Date: Sept. 1, 2022

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PC Preview - 'You Suck at Parking'

by Cody Medellin on Oct. 28, 2020 @ 12:00 a.m. PDT

You Suck At Parking is the world's most extreme physics-based parking game, and the only racing game where the goal is to stop (probably).

Sometimes, the games with the simplest concepts provide a ridiculous amount of fun. A good example is last year's What The Golf, a game that looked like a simple take on mini golf but flipped the concept around in so many ways that it became ridiculous and awesome. The developers at Happy Volcano have taken this idea to heart with their latest title, You Suck At Parking, a driving game that quickly devolves into something more chaotic.

Throughout the game's courses, your job is to drive a car to a parking lot and fill up all of the spots with cars before the timer expires. It doesn't have to be a perfect parking job, but as long as part of the car is on the spot, it'll count, and five seconds will be added to the timer. That lax judgement also means that you aren't given a letter grade based on your performance, so there's no need to rush and get the fastest time possible or the least amount of cars remaining in the road before you fill in those spots.


There are, of course, caveats to the vehicles you're piloting. You can move forward, and you can brake, but you can't put the car in reverse, and the minute you stop, the car is considered parked, whether or not you're at your spot. Cars can also run out of gas, and although you're never given a meter to see how much fuel is left, you can safely deduce that there's only enough gas in each car to reach the furthest parking spot on the map. Aside from that, each car moves the same, so going from a small car to a big truck provides no change in vehicle handling and speed — a godsend, since the cars are completely random.

Aside from the vehicles, the tracks provide their own obstacles to overcome. It starts off simply with hairpin turns and even loops on the road. Soon, you deal with ramps and turbo boosters, and eventually, you'll deal with a variety of obstacles, including heated barriers that make your car explode, pads that launch your car into the air, giant fans that'll blow you off course, and giant magnets that'll pull you off course. It doesn't take long to combine all of these elements to create tracks that are completely chaotic in nature and more challenging than expected. You can safely call this a car version of What The Golf, and it lives up to that not because of the zaniness and low stress level. Even with the timer counting down, the music doesn't deviate from being cheerful. Spawning new cars to drive doesn't take long, and neither do restarts, so the game feels quick overall since it also has no load screens.


While the demo is pretty meaty in terms of levels , the developers promise to provide a bunch more challenges for players to work through. If that weren't enough, the game is also promising to give players the ability to create their own tracks and make them downloadable to the public. It remains to be seen how easy and robust the creation tools are, but if similar games like TrackMania are anything to go by, expect the community to deliver if they pick this up.

As it stands now, You Suck At Parking has the potential to be a sleeper hit. It's simple to understand and takes very little time to get the controls down. The difficulty ramp is low, and retries are easy, but the new gimmicks that are added to every challenge will be the deciding factor in whether you come back for more, since they can turn quick gaming sessions into hours of playtime. There's still plenty of time before the game's 2021 release, but we can't wait to see how this one progresses.



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