Dream Car Racing 3D Preview

When it comes to off-road driving in videogames, I always come back to 2009s Fuel from Codemasters. I had it on my 360, and it was excellent: a huge wasteland of races, challenges and just fun environments to drive around in. Dream Car Racing 3D gave me similar vibes, and I wanted to try it out since Fuel has long since been lost to GFWL.

I discovered that, instead of prebuilt, pre designed vehicles you have to make your own, kind of. The game starts you with a standard chassis, and looking through the steam workshop at what other people have been making it seems that the default is as good as you’ll get. The interface for designing vehicles felt very similar to 3D modelling software, with right-click moving the camera around the vehicle and the building done with click-and-drag inputs.

All the components can be upgraded with the money you’ll earn from racing, though the actual parts don’t cost anything themselves. You’ll need to compound a lot of those upgrades to have any noticeable change in your vehicle, but the upgrades can be relatively cheap if you’re ok with driving around the game’s wasteland collecting coins. The only thing you can really do with the design of your car is cosmetic, so if you wanted to drive around a desert in a London Cab, then more power to you.

The customisation is strong, but somewhat tedious

The actual driving was a massive disappointment: despite texture changes, the terrain reacts all the same and the car is extremely bouncy. You can drive over what I would assume to be a muddy field and slip out as if there were no traction at all, or collide into a small ridge and fly up in the air. The driving itself feels very floaty and often it feels like you’re not in control at all, and in my experience the upgrades actually only serve to make this worse.

The terrain is really boring too: there’s no plant life, and few buildings around the map. Everything looks like a single texture that is recoloured, and even the races are indistinguishable from each other. This is probably because they’re all randomly generated paths on the map, rather than handcrafted tracks that can test your car’s ability. Every time you complete a race - which is against ghosts of yourself and markers based on times the game sets - you can make a new track, and while you can set up a variety of weather effects, time of day and difficulty, the weather effects didn’t really do anything for me and the time of day just changes the sky texture.

There is a sandbox mode, which I’d assume was for testing out your vehicle but it seems it’s for driving around the landscape collecting money for upgrades, as a random amount of coins will spawn somewhere nearby. Only one set of coins will spawn at a time, and they can be anywhere around you, the further away the more will be there. This leads the sandbox mode to be mostly driving around in circles.

To your left, endless sand, to your right, endless sand

I came into Dream Car Racing 3D hoping for an updated Fuel, but it plays like a shallow driving game with more effort placed in the aesthetics of the cars than in making it satisfying to drive them. With nothing to race against, aside from the clock, it makes everything feel very empty and hollow. The annoying thing is that no matter how great you make your car look, it’s all set on a very boring backdrop so your screenshots will always be a bit sub-par.