What The Car review: racing game meets improv comedy

If there was any moment in Triband’s deliciously snackable new arcade racer that was going to lose us, it’s very early on, when the eponymous car which you control sheds its wheels like an unnecessary British summer layer and two legs pop out. And then you run that bipedal car along What The Car’s first course, immediately understanding that this is not going to trouble Gran Turismo 7 in the simulation stakes. 

But it didn’t lose us. Instead, what that intro does is convey that even though you’re watching a pair of cartoon shoes scuffle their way around a corner, there’s still a pretty satisfying sense of weight transfer and inertia to the ‘handling’, one that the game proceeds to take in all manner of improbable directions from scoring a goal using a car-ball to bouncing a spring-covered chassis over large bodies of water. 

Is it actually a racing game? Debatable. On one hand, the car you control takes practically every form other than an actual car over the course of the game’s many zones, each riffing on a particular theme like jetpacks or sports. It seems to be going to improbable lengths not to be a car game. On the other: well, it’s about getting from the start to the finish of a course as quickly as possible, and it turns out that’s all the justification we needed to become absolutely obsessed with setting gold medal times in every level. 

A lot of that comes down to the atmosphere of sheer enjoyment What The Car somehow conjures. This arrangement of bright colours and slapstick pratfalls could so easily reach toxic levels of twee, but it doesn’t. Even when you find yourself conversing with a cartoon bear by beeping a horn, it doesn’t.

‘Car but big legs!’ the game sings to you before you lollop along like Victor Wembanyama stuffed into a 2CV. ‘Car on office chairs!’ it warbles a few levels later, sounding like a haunted Imogen Heap song as you corral a top-heavy hatchback in between roadblocks and gangs of forest mammals. And just as you stick it perfectly through a tricky section of corners, you remember: oh yeah. Games used to be really fun, didn’t they?

Somewhere in all the battle passes and quality of life patches, it’s been too easy for us all to forget that the actual, moment by moment, meat-and-potatoes interaction in a game is supposed to be enjoyable. Triband is quietly a bit of an expert in this lost art, as you’ll find if you play a few holes of its previous hit What The Golf, and its greatest trick is making it all seem so simple to achieve: great physics, fun levels, funny central concept. 

Of course, all three of those are so hard to come by that they’re almost mythological concepts in gaming by now. That’s why it’s so impressive that controlling a car on legs feels satisfying. The way those limbs scrabble around for grip and skid around tight turns. The joyous way that trackside obstacles shatter when you hit them. The giddy carnage of launching yourself off a jump pad and into a pit of footballs, for reasons that make perfect sense after you’ve been playing for a few levels and have become attuned to What The Car’s nonsense world of vehicular mad libs. 

It’s genuinely quite an achievement, then, to make a quasi-racing game this much of a laugh. We don’t even hold a grudge that there are no customisable widebody kits or energy drink branding to be seen. Instead, in the track periphery where one might ordinarily find ad boards and caffeinated bovines, there are collectible cards and shortcut options that unlock faster times. Both are surprisingly compelling diversions. 

At first it’s so easy. Stay on the track and make use of whatever novelty mechanic’s been thrown at you, whether it’s a jetpack or a jump button. But then the tracks get windier. The giant legs pop up, ready to boot you off into the sea if you get too close. The placement of the speed boost pads becomes a bit more deliberate, revealing an ideal racing line that’s every bit as challenging as guiding a GT3 car around Assetto Corsa Competizione’s laser-scanned Portimao.

Just in case that wasn’t ruinous enough to our schedule, the user-made tracks happen to be particularly excellent. While the developer is constrained by things like teaching you new tricks and building courses that match a common theme, amateur creator are unshackled by such concerns and have already built an impressive stack of absolutely absurd courses. 

We’ve played so much of this game over the past few days that actual cars are starting to look a bit wrong to us. Call that a concept car, Lotus? Where are the legs? The springs? Yeah… we should probably take a little break.