Underground Garage has a lot of things going for it in the simulator department. A core part of the experience is dismantling cars down to their component parts. As someone who is, in all things, mechanically inept, this is quite appealing. I have no idea what all these different parts are for, but I like taking them out, polishing them, and putting them back in. There was a lot that went wrong in my time with Underground Garage, but that aspect, at least, was quite fun.
Everything around it is significantly less fun though. Underground Garage is a game that needed to spend significantly more time in Early Access. From the multitude of bugs, to the absolutely bonkers physics, to the weird progression: it is just not ready. As a result, the moments of entertainment were smothered under a blanket of annoyances. The world that felt so appealingly big at the start quickly began to shrink.
Desire For Acceleration
Underground Garage puts us in the shoes of a new mechanic, who looks and moves like he’s permanently on a cocktail of exotic substances. He starts off by cleaning up some engines, and doing some repair jobs, before a bunch of hooded goons smashes up the garage. Turns out one of the other mechanics was an informant for the FBI and fell foul of a local mob, and it falls to us to pick up the pieces. Led by the garage’s owner, Deb, we fix up cars for the cash and renown needed to get the garage back on its feet.
In basic terms, Underground Garage is split between two things: fixing cars and racing them. Basic car repair jobs are the best initial way to get some cash flow in, which expands to engine tuning and paint jobs as you repair the garage. Once you take the job, you pop the car on the lift and click the diagnose button. It’ll tell you what’s busted, and you need to take those bits out and repair or replace them. Parts of the car follow a strict hierarchy. If you want to take out the pistons, for example, you’ll need to take out everything around them first. From the camshaft covers to the rod caps. It’s strangely meditative, pulling out all the parts of an engine in order, and then reassembling them back.
In fact, the most fun I had with Underground Garage was when I bought a scrap car at the junkyard. It had a chassis, engine, and most of the suspension components, but nothing else. I meticulously removed each part, repaired it and assembled it back, adding missing parts when I had the money. It was fun. There are still annoyances though. The camera really doesn’t play ball when looking inside small spaces, for instance. It’d also be nice to be able to highlight a certain part, so I don’t have to hunt out where they’ve moved the ECU to this time. The shopping interface is godawful too, forcing you to search for a part and select the engine or car model every single time you open it.
Tinkering With Bugs
The other half, the racing, is where everything starts to go wrong with Underground Garage. For one, the cars handle very strangely. No matter how much I tightened things up, steering felt very heavy. Even the best brakes barely slowed me down, so cornering was more about aiming my nose and praying. It’s not just me, either. The AI would routinely crash into corners and have to extract themselves from the metal barrier before they could carry on. As soon as I learned not to crash, I would be routinely winning races.
The physics are nuts as well. In my first race, I crashed into the back of another car, and it sent me flying through the air, end over end, until I came to rest propped up against a shipping container. It’s not unusual to see other cars flying through the air, or to suddenly flip over onto your side during a race. It’s nuts. You’d think these cars are filled with nothing but helium. Despite that, some races are bizarrely easy. After I rebuilt my first car, I did a race that was just a giant oval and it earned me ten grand. It was so simple a race that it became easy to get as much money as I could ever want through betting.
I had over a hundred grand before I’d finished rebuilding the garage. It’s not the only part of Underground Garage that feels like it’s all out of order. Midway through rebuilding the garage, I got a text congratulating me on my first car. I didn’t have one then. I figured it had just forgotten to give me one, so I went to the junkyard and got one. After fixing up that car, I then got a quest to go and buy one. This was after constant repair jobs, mind you. Even one of the initial cutscenes was backwards. I got a message asking if I was okay before the scene of the goons smashing up the garage. Of course I’m okay. I was just lying in bed at that point.
Underground Garage – Far From Finished
On top of all that, Underground Garage is absolutely riddled with game ruining bugs. For one, new races just stopped unlocking, no matter what I did. Secondly, make sure you don’t open the options menu because it refuses to go away after you do so. Then there was the big one. One of the missions has you installing GPS tracked ECUs, but I accidentally installed one into a car that wasn’t for that mission. It let me do this, and there was no way to replace the one I lost. So I just softlocked my entire run. I wasn’t prepared to spend fourteen hours getting back to that point, as I had done a lot of repair jobs and races to get to that point.
Which is sort of the main issue with Underground Garage. The meditative repair work is there, and the busted garage gives you a goal to strive for, but it’s dragged down by everything else. From the ugly human models to the awful controller support. The fact that the racing is so awkward and unsatisfying means that that engine repairing is all you’ve got. If you can lose yourself in that, then you’ll find some fun. In the end though, you’ll be asked to drive the car to the drop-off location and it’ll all go downhill.
