Pitstop Challenge Review

Did I ever tell you how I gave up smoking? It was about five years ago now. I went to the dentist complaining of toothache and it turned out I had a wisdom tooth growing sideways toward my other teeth, meaning there was a lot of pressure on my back molars. After an x-ray it turned out that all four of my wisdom teeth were growing sideways, so it was decided the best thing to do was for me to have all four of them removed at the same time. Because of the direction they were growing in, each would have to be surgically removed as well. This meant that I had to have stitches put in. For three weeks after the surgery I couldn’t open my mouth properly to speak and I couldn’t eat anything more solid than mashed potato and soup. The upside of this was that I physically couldn’t smoke, so I managed to give up a dirty habit. The downside was that I was in constant pain during my recuperation. Nevertheless, those three weeks were more fun than the seven hours I spent playing Pitstop Challenge.

I’ll be the first to admit that I’m something of a nerd when it comes to Motorsport. I’m one of those people that actually reads up on all the new rules each year and has discussions with their friends in the pub about the merits of stop strategies and wing design. This means that a game like Pitstop Challenge, which sees you in control of a Formula One pit crew, really appealed to me. It’s a great concept for a game. There’s plenty of games that see you racing the cars, but there aren’t any that deal specifically with the tactics employed by the engineering crew behind the drivers. If you ask any racing driver, they’ll tell you they couldn’t do what they do without the team behind them, so it’s certainly an important job. It’s not just the changing of tyres that you see on the TV that is so important; it’s tuning the suspension just so for each track, making sure the wheels are balanced just right to match expected weather conditions, planning the optimum time to come into the pits so as to lose the least places, and so on. Apparently, all these subtle influences were completely lost on Laudo Games, who seem to have released a game about waiting in a garage for half an hour, then clicking the screen 42 times. I counted; there was nothing better to do.

You start off in the garage. Your team are staring blankly at the wall. There are usually monitors around the garage displaying telemetry but the team will only see these if they happen to be on their staring wall. This, it turns out, doesn't actually matter as the screens are only there for decoration: there is literally no telemetry in the game at all. You can see a diagram of your team’s car and the wear and tear on wheels and wings and that's it. I’m not sure why the wing is shown though, because there’s no option to change it anyway - even though you can train your mechanics to do it. (More on that in a bit.) When it’s time to come in, you call a pitstop and you are then treated to an overhead view of the pit, in which you can click one by one on each member of the team to assign them a job.

You can see how excited they are about victory...

These jobs aren’t automatable in any way, meaning you have to tell team members what to do each time. This isn’t as simple as “put on the new tyre” either. You have to click the team member you want, then click on the tyre, and then click on the part of the car where the tyre is in case they were going to shove it up their nose or something. Each team member has a dizzying array of stats that presumably influence how well they can do the job, but with no tutorial and no explanation of how they do it, good luck working out what they do. Even if you could, you haven’t got enough time to work out which of your identical looking minions is which anyway as you have a very limited time in which to issue commands before the pitstop begins.

Skills are viewable but not trainable. There is a training menu, which trains people to do a particular job. Everyone comes in with level 1 and can be trained to higher levels, presumably meaning they will be quicker. The thing is, you can finish every race with level 1 mechanics anyway so what’s the point? When playing the game, all you see is those arbitrary “skills” in the crew menu anyway, so the only way you would be able to assign mechanics to their optimal job would be to write their names down and assign them manually. With a maximum of 60 seconds between calling for a stop and the car arriving, there’s no way you’ll be doing that unless you have fingers that can move at 60mph. (If you do, then I know a few people who would like to meet you if you catch my drift.)

If you don’t meet that 60-second window then you can still assign mechanics to their jobs, but the ability to queue tasks is gone. What this means is that to get someone to fit a new tyre for example, you have to click on them, click on the tyre, wait until they saunter over to it and pick it up and then click on the icon next to the tyre that needs changing. If you try and click too early, you just get an error message.

And if you don’t get that particular message, then you will get plenty of other error messages, all written by someone who clearly doesn’t speak English. Sometimes you’ll click on a mechanic and get the message “no mechanic selected”, sometimes you’ll click on a wheel to be changed and get an erroneous “Character have no actions that picks required item”. My personal favourite error though is the one that you get if you don’t call the car in before the tyres get <10% life left. It says “one of bolid parts is already broken, you must make pitstop”. It’s like reading the badly translated instructions from a knock-off gadget you bought on eBay, but without the satisfaction of having a new toy to play with.

There’s so little to this game, it would feel like a steep price if it was a £1.49 mobile title; on a £7.99 Steam release, it just seems like a total and utter rip off. And with so little in the game, they could at least get the small amount of content that is present correct. Mechanics will randomly disappear meaning you can’t finish a pitstop. Your mechanics’ overalls will change colour for no reason between races. If you ask a mechanic to stand in front of the car, it will drive straight through him instead of running the useless bastard over. There’s more bugs here than the kitchen of a discount kebab shop.

Collision detection? What's that?

As soon as you finish a pitstop, it tells you what the weather will be like at the next one. This is seemingly entirely random as it goes from storm to perfect sunshine in the blink of an eye. Not that you’d know as the sky in the background never changes at all, so it always looks like brilliant sunshine. The effects of the weather always seem to kick in just as you make your stop, regardless of when that is, so you can ignore the weather forecast until the tyres wear down.

The tyres wearing down is literally the only indicator that you have of when to stop by the way. There’s no option to choose a number of stops or what lap to stop on. You don’t even get told how many laps are in a race, so you just have to guess anyway. The tyres magically manage to wear entirely evenly as well, so you will always change all four at once. Sometimes, little messages flash at the bottom like “marbles at turn 3” or “debris at turn 6” but these seem to have no impact on the game and are just aesthetic fluff. In fact, other than choosing the type of tyre relevant to the weather condition that will magically appear next time you change tyre, very little has any effect on the race. The lap times are the same regardless of conditions, you can pit as often as you want and you’ll always end up first as long as you picked the right tyres, even if you pit every lap!

The pitstops last for maybe a minute and a half at the most and you’ll get through about four or five of them in the average race of about an hour and a half. The rest of the time, you will be watching your crew stand motionless in the garage, staring at that wall like a bad Daft Punk tribute band while the race plays out in the background. Fortunately, there are options to speed the race up by 10 or 20 times and if you punish yourself by playing this game, you will definitely want to do that. If you don’t and you try to play in real time; bring a book. I actually cleaned my kitchen during one race at normal speed between stops. If you find yourself doing household chores to kill time during a game, it’s probably safe to say it’s not a good game.

I really wanted to find something nice to say about this game and the one thing I could find was that there’s a couple of nice instrumental songs on the title screen. One of them seems to be a prog-metal type affair, so if you like that kind of thing, you might like the soundtrack. You can have these looping in the background of the game if you want, but that will probably get old as there seems to only be four songs. The alternative though is focusing on the wet fart sounds that are supposed to be race cars and mumbled incoherent radio chatter that repeats itself ad nauseam. I decided the best thing to do was to mute the game entirely and listen to the latest GrinCast instead.

This is all you get if you complete the game

Overall, I just can’t recommend Pitstop Challenge at all. It feels like someone had a brilliant idea for a game, and then entrusted a toddler who has never watched any motorsport to make it. They might as well have drawn the whole thing with crayons, at least then it would seem like the developer put some effort in by resisting the urge to eat them. Quite frankly, this game is one of the absolute worst that I’ve ever played. If there is any justice in the world, the developers will be forced to play their own game until they can’t take it anymore and beg for forgiveness, promising to try harder next time. If you like watching people watch walls, then you’ll love this game. If you do though, get help.