Barely-functional hipster garbage.

The gameplay loop is so utterly tedious and devoid of things to do, that playing the game for about 15 minutes will give you the entire gameplay experience for the whole of Jalopy. Not only that, but no matter how attentive to your car's needs, no matter how carefully you mix your fuel, top up fluids, maintain parts and tyres, the car *will* break down, even if you stick to proper roads. This then forces you to walk to the nearest garage to get repairs, which could be about 10 minutes of real time walking away, and there is just no point. And the oh-so-retro intentionally-terrible graphical style gets old after approximately 30 seconds. Absolute ♥♥♥♥.

Rule 1: Always remember that Jalopy is a bug-filled, glitchy, janky mess--even as we look at the rest of the game.

The biggest shame for this game is the unmet potential and promise. Because the core gameplay, the resource management, the cozy driving, the very light roguelike elements all work to create a neat package.

In fairness, you can complete the game, you can finish the story, you can even 100% all of the achievements (having to use various release options)--it is feature complete.

There's a good game somewhere in Jalopy--after 50 hours of achievement hunting to clear out my backlog, I can say that with confidence.

The problem is that it is buried DEEP DOWN beneath the pile of mess, and if you can put up with all of that, this game *could* be worth a buy on a DEEP sale price.

Some examples of the most serious issues: the world geometry can overlap itself creating impassable roadblocks with a random mountain in the middle of the road, one border booth in particular is constantly inaccessible if you drive to it facing forward because the window is on the "wrong side" for the car and your character cannot reach the NPC, items disappear at random if you make it to the final country and finish it, you can fall through the world completely (also the only way to 100% this without spending hundreds of hours), and so on.

I wouldn't buy it again and I'm sorry I did, even so many years later. I wouldn't tell anyone else to pick it up either. There's far more and far better games in this genre and in similar ones that are far better and more fun to play.

I'm glad I finally played it to get it out of my library. But it was wholly unsatisfying as an experience and a terribly torturous quest to 100% with 50 hours of continual pain, bug squashing, and using exploits to skirt problems.

Skip it.

Bug