Notmycar – Beta Preview

Review by SpelunkerTim

BUCKLE UP, BUTTERCUP!

otmycar is a white-knuckle, lead-footed multiplayer vehicular combat battle royale game. Drop into a massive battleground and use cool weapons and abilities to battle your way through single-elimination combat and become the ultimate survivor. Outlast the competition through cunning, skill, and a little bit of strategy. Customize your ride to make it a beast of a vehicle to take on anyone, anytime.

FEATURES

Drop – Get a double-shot of adrenaline when you glide your freaking car into every match. Pick the best landing zones on a massive island battleground that gets smaller and smaller, driving all your enemies right into your waiting sights.

Drive– How are they gonna recognize the champ when they see you? Because you can customize your battle wagon to the nines. Make sure your worthless enemies know exactly who bombed them into oblivion as you do donuts in their fiery remains. Flags, paint-jobs, and more, it’s all up to you.

Destroy – It’s pedal-to-the-metal as you race to snatch the best weapons from caches all over the island. Battle Royale means second place is the first loser, so show no mercy for anyone on four wheels. Fight your way to the top of the junk heap to be the last car standing!

Duke it out with other drivers to see if you have what it takes to survive the fast paced, chaotic, tire squealing mayhem.

Well that’s what the steam page has to say but does Notmycar deliver on its promises or is it just another battle royal game trying to cash in on the success of Fortnite and Player Unknown’s Battle Grounds? I took part in the beta to find out.

Notmycar starts on the home screen where you can choose your game type which during the test drive was limited to quick matches. You can also visit the garage where you are able to customise your vehicle, keep track of season progress, challenges and statistics. This is where I found my first annoyance and it is in the form of customisation. If you are going to promise customisation to the nines then I would expect to be able to greatly change the appearance of my vehicle. Sadly, with Notmycar, this is not the case and basic colours and a few flags is all that’s on offer.

The Main way to get your vehicle to look different to someone else’s is to get a skin from the shop just like every other battle royale game. So the only way to stand out is to pay for skins or earn the cash in-game by earning XP and levelling up. I imagine this will be a long and grinding process with the bronze level season pass as rewards are few and far between. The platinum season pass gives you more rewards but I imagine the pass will cost real money to purchase when the game is released.

Time to get into my car and go wreck some faces! This is where the second annoyance comes in! There is absolutely no information on what you are supposed to be doing. No tutorial, no instructions, no information at all about how to play, what weapons there are or how they work. You are in at the deep end and must figure things out yourself. Thankfully the game mechanics are almost a direct copy of Fortnite with the weapons and armour being coloured in exactly the same way. White for common, green for uncommon, blue for rare, magenta for epic and gold for legendary. There are 4 armour types for hood, wheels, engine and chassis and I’m not sure how many weapon types there are but it seems to be all the typical ones such as railgun, shotgun, machine gun, gatling gun, rocket launcher etc.

Gameplay was pretty much as I expected. Queue for a match which takes about five minutes only to find you have only moved to a holding area where you spend another 5 minutes mindlessly ramming into each other on a test track. Eventually the match will start in the obligatory transport plane and you decide when to drop. There isn’t much control in flight so you won’t get far from where you drop and this will result in all the players generally being in a long line following the planes trajectory. Gameplay is fairly fast paced with the usual shrinking shield thing reducing in size at a rapid rate so if you find yourself on the wrong side of it taking damage you will need to go hell for leather to survive. If you drop centre map you will nearly always have loads of time to get the best gear as the circles all seem to end up round that area. The next annoyance is the weapons and special modules. The ramp module is basically useless from what I could tell, being too small to launch you on top of a building. I couldn’t see any other reason to use it. The cloaking module actually makes you easier to see due to the predator like watery shimmer being visible from render distance! The shield and the proximity mines seem to be the only things worth using.

As for the weapons then where do we start? The Gatling gun is the only gun worth using! All other weapons fire too slow or are too inaccurate. The railgun never hits where you aim it and takes ages to charge, the rocket launcher travels about 3 mph so you need to guess where the target will be when the thing eventually hits. The machine gun recoil makes it spray about like a kid with a garden hose and the shotgun is weaker than a pea shooter!

Huge amounts of testing and weapon balancing need to be done before matches can be fair. Whatever weapon you choose you will always get destroyed by that one kid who spent the whole match hiding in a corner doing nothing until the very end then comes in while you are fighting the penultimate player and kills you both with a lucky grenade! Just like most battle royale games there is no reward or incentive to go for kills. There is as much reward for hiding as there is for playing and that makes for a boring game! Camp in a bush and wait for everyone else to die! Sound familiar Fortnite players?

So whats the verdict I hear you ask? Well to be honest I am in two minds about this one. Is it a clone of Fortnite and PUBG in cars? Yes, it definitely is! But its more limited because you can’t leave your car! There are other vehicular combat games out there such as Crossout and Robocraft but they offer so much more than just battle royale. You build your own vehicles and choose the weapons and you can play different game modes.

Notmycar is currently too basic to compete with any of the current battle royale games. Way more customisation is needed to make the player feel involved and unique but I fear this will be hidden behind a huge paywall the same as so many other games of this type. It’s a fun game to play but it’s a long way from being the next big thing. It seems the developers have focused too much on making the weapons and modules the same as other games instead of thinking outside the box and doing something new.

Frankly, I found the weapon types quite boring because it’s all been done before too many times. The whole thing feels like someone has looked at what’s popular right now and pulled a few bits from each game and shoved it together into a package that doesn’t quite deliver. Its still in beta so there is a long way to go yet. With a bit of a weapon and module rework, an introduction of different game modes and a decent level of customisation (not just 2 colour zones) then this game could show promise but as it stands it is nothing more than mediocre

Overall Score – 5/10

Badger

Life long gamer and Geek, Considered by most to be of doubtable sanity. never seen without my trusty Stetson

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