Car Breakers Review

Trial and error is the key to success in Car Breakers. It’s a physics game where you have to direct a car containing a crash test dummy in it, before eventually propelling the dummy across the level. It’s kind of fun, although it can turn a little samey.

At first, each level is about holding your finger down to the screen to get your car’s speed up to par before releasing it. Once it’s released, it follows a direct path dictated by the game till it hits an obstacle. That’s where you can choose the angle at which the dummy is released. The dummy needs to follow a particular path, collecting various bits and pieces before leaping through the exit. This exit can be pretty wacky, such as the mouth of a dinosaur. One particularly entertaining level requires you to fling the dummy at a set of dominos, hopefully taking them all out.

Other levels involve you directing the car along a path, with the left-hand side of the screen controlling acceleration and the right-hand side dictating braking. It makes a pleasant enough change of pace and goes some way to reducing the risk of monotony.

Car Breakers offers the chance to unlock new cars as you progress, which then leads to new worlds to check out. While the challenge might remain the same, it does give you a sense of progression. The main issue is that a lot of Car Breakers is down to trial and error. You’ll find yourself repeating levels frequently to try to get the angle just right, and it’s not always as thrilling as it’d like to be.

There are some stability problems too, as I found when trying to run the game on my iPhone 5. It crashed out before I even got anywhere, although the build on my iPad mini Retina was very stable.

Car Breakers is currently on sale, which makes it seem reasonable for what it offers. However, at full price I probably wouldn’t consider it gripping enough to be worth a purchase.