Extreme Car Driving Simulator 6.82.1

By looking at Extreme Car Driving Simulator (that's a mouthful) I realized that to create a convincing driving simulator on Android seems to be a very hard thing to pull off. From what I've seen with GT Racing 2, realistic looking cars can be fun to play with, but the varied limitations of the tablet medium makes realism less attractive on such a small platform.

Extreme Car Driving Simulator is a sandbox type game. Once you pick a game mode (Free, Checkpoint or Traffic) you are then plunged into a small city, complete with an airport and an off-road range. You can then drive wherever you want and crash into as many walls as you can. Even though this game is offered for free, I could not but felt a little robbed when I saw the car behave much like a wheeled brick. There is no flow to its movement and suspensions are nonexistent. 'Where's the simulator?' I asked. No one answered though.

The three modes are there to bring some variety to the otherwise stale environment. The city is very dull and without some special challenges or hard to reach bonuses there would be no incentive to keep playing beyond ten minutes. Traffic and Free come with challenge areas that require speed or acrobatic maneuvers, the latter being a capability which these cars do not possess. Checkpoint mode however seems rather uninspired. Not only that checkpoint type challenges are already available in the other two modes, this one uses no direction arrow, so you're usually left looking for checkpoints like it's some treasure hunt game. Or maybe it is and they named it wrong...

There are some fun aspects though. The cars come with a weird damage model where the body mesh folds when you hit something. It's not at all realistic but it can be an fun to see how deformed your car can get. Another neat trick is reset-jumping. You know that function that flips your car on its wheels and drops is from a moderate height? Well, in Extreme Car Driving Simulator it does just that except that it also keeps the momentum. So you can essentially use Reset to jump over obstacles. Furthermore, you can Reset multiple times in a row, raising your car higher and higher. In this way you can even jump over airplanes or trees. Now I understand the "extreme" part of the title.

In any case, Extreme Car Driving Simulator is a neat endeavor and can offer some minutes of mindless fun from time to time.