My Summer Car (2016) Review #blogpost

My summer car is an open world survival game that was developed by Amistech and was released on Steam as early access in 2016. I wouldn’t normally review a survival game, but My Summer Car is different. I will go more into that.

You’ve got to build and upgrade your car whilst trying to make money by delivering fire wood using a tractor and cleaning out people’s septic tanks using a vacuum truck. You have to eat, sleep and drink to stay alive. Seeing as it’s a survival game, there is a “predator”, A Fiat/SEAT 133 driver that races on the dirt roads as if he’s Tommi Mäkinen.

When you start off in the game, you have a case of beer, a pack of sausages, your car laid out in pieces on your garage floor and 3000 Marks. When I saw all this I thought “Holy sh!t, I’m going to die”. You’ve got to plan everything out very carefully, because people call you whenever and the shop closes quite early. The good thing is that now you can sleep in the septic truck and basically camp outside the shop. Just don’t do what I did and get so drunk that you end up back at your house without the truck.

There are six driveable vehicles the game. The Satsuma is your car that you have to build, Race and modify. The Satsuma is based on a Datsun 100A and it’s probably the vehicle that you’ll spend the most time with. The Ferndale is the muscle car that’s owned by Fleetari. The Ferndale is based on the sixth generation Dodge Coronet. It is the fastest car in the game, and it is very hard to control if you’re not careful. The boat is very small and is only used to get to the small island in the middle of the lake and going to the shop. I don’t recommend using the boat to go to the shop, because things can fall out of it very easily. The Gifu is the Septic truck that you use to make money and sleep in (although you also have a bed). It is based on the Sisu M-series, and is it is the most powerful vehicle in the game with a 315BHP Rolls-Royce engine (according to my-summer-car.wikia.com). The Hayosiko is the Toyota Hiace based van that you only really use to go to the shop and pick up beer. The Kekmet is the tractor that is used to pull the log trailer and picking things up with the forklift. You can also take the bus, but I wouldn’t recommend that, because means taking public transport.

There are five main characters (NPCs) in the game. There is the shopkeeper and bar man Teimo. Teimo is tell you random things just to make conversation, although your character can’t speak to him other than swearing, but he doesn’t seem to like that. Fleetari is the mechanic that fixes the Satsuma. He seems like an alright person, until you don’t give back his muscle car. When you don’t give the muscle car back to him, he will do things to the Satsuma. Lindell is the car inspector and there isn’t really anything to say about him, because he game’s creators didn’t give him a personality. Pekka is the bus driver and I don’t know what his personality is supposed to be like, bus he is a bus driver, so I’m going to assume that he’s always in a bad mood. The b*d in the little green Fiat/SEAT 133 is known as Jaakko. You should avoid him at all costs.

Building the car is fun and frustrating at the same time, because building the car is fun, but the game doesn’t tell you what size spanners you need, and sometimes a single part could need more than you size spanner. When you start off in the game, the Satsuma is in pieces and is outside you garage. I like as if your character drove it home one day, parked it outside and then decided to take it apart. All of the parts that came from your car are laid out on your garage floor and on the shelf. That makes life much easier.

You can upgrade the Satsuma with parts that you have to order. You have to order parts by filling out an order form, and then you have to go to the shop in the village of Peräjärvi to post it. That’s just too far to go just to mail something, and then you have to go back to the shop to pick up the parts, and if you order everything at once you have to make more than one trip to the shop.

There are a lot of upgrades and parts for you to buy, and most of them are easy to fit, but only if you’ve already fitted the stock parts first. This is because once you’ve fitted the parts once then you’ll know what you’re doing the second time. Overall, building the Satsuma is fun, but they could have made it a bit easier.

The map is good and boring at the same time, because it’s got a huge variety of roads, but it is very small, and a lot of it is taken up by the big lake. There are two small towns called Loppe and Peräjärvi, which are placed quite far from each other if you take the size of the map into consideration. Rykipohja is the place with the Airfield, Landfill Site and dirt track for the rallies. There need to be a map expansion at some point, because it’s starting to get boring just going to the same places over and over again.

To conclude this review, My summer car has a lot of thing to do, has some good upgraded car parts and you can spend hours in the games and end up doing nothing. The map does need an expansion of some sort and the car could have been easier to build. Overall, I will give My summer car 9 out of 10. I recommend buying this game.