Can't Drive This Review

If you’ve ever wanted to fulfill any fantasies about driving at top speed with reckless abandon as you let the road tell you where you need to go, well, this is NOT the game for that.

In Can’t Drive This, you are—quite literally—letting the road demand where you need to go. And yes, you drive at top speed, but no, it’s not because you want to—it’s because you need to. Driving too slowly doesn’t exactly bode well for you, because if you don’t pick up the pace and get your butt going, you’ll burst in a fiery explosion of flames to your ultimate demise. What, then, is stopping you from pumping gas and just driving like mad into the sunset? The thing is that the road doesn’t always cooperate, and it might not even be there in the first place. You are at the mercy of the gods of RNG—or in this case, the player who’s pulling the strings.

Can’t Drive This has different game modes and supports up to four players, but the basic premise is that one player drives while the other builds the road, making for a surefire one-way ticket to complete pandemonium with every gaming session.

In the Yardage co-op game mode, one random player builds the road while the other three drive through the treacherous path laid out before them. Driving too slowly or falling to your death takes you out of commission, but you can respawn and pick up where you left off if a teammate drives by and tags you for a save. The game ends when all players are out, and you get rewarded by sweet, sweet stats that show which player reigns supreme as king of the road. 

The whole thing might sound simple enough, but here’s the catch: the next patch of road that the builder gets is completely randomized, which means you can be cruising along a flat and totally safe stretch of road one moment and come face-to-face with a gigantic fan that blows you away the next. Bumps in the road include crazy speed ramps, chaotic mud pits, and annoying puddles of water (or fog clouds) that blur your entire screen so you can’t see a thing. If you’ve always thought of yourself as a good driver, Can’t Drive This will chuck all of those preconceived notions of driving games out the window.

Does it make any sense? Absolutely not. Is it insanely enjoyable? Heck yes.

"Each match has three rounds, and I guarantee that at the end of every battle, either triumphant sounds of maniacal laughter or tortured laments of desolation will wail out halfway across town (or your living room)." 

Personally, my favorite game mode is Capture The Egg, where you’re teamed up with a fellow player against the opposing side, and you fight to capture each other’s egg from your base the quickest. In a four-player game, there’s one builder and one driver for each team, and you can resort to all sorts of devious trickery to make sure that your team emerges victorious. 

I’m talking about all kinds of shenanigans from building traps for the other team to downright blocking their way and sabotaging their path every chance you get. Each match has three rounds, and I guarantee that at the end of every battle, either triumphant sounds of maniacal laughter or tortured laments of desolation will wail out halfway across town (or your living room). 

I played Can’t Drive This with my husband, niece, and nephew, and somehow, with each couch session, the kids just somehow kept getting better and better at coming up with mischievous ways to pull one over us. For instance, I was driving along willy-nilly at one point and suddenly got lured into a speed ramp that launched me straight into a dead-end with no choice but to explode (those meddling kids!). When I was the designated builder for my team during another session, I was frantically building the perfect path for us when the builder of the other team immediately built a random ramp right in front of me, effectively ruining my perfect path to victory. 

Of course, what goes around comes around, as my husband and I have now devised a clever ploy to lay down a path for them straight to our base but leave them with no way back to theirs once they capture our egg. We’re feeling pretty proud of ourselves, but I’m absolutely certain the victory is fleeting—pretty soon, they’ll figure out a more ingenious way to school us and send us home packing in our next play session.

And there WILL be a next play session, as the kids haven’t stopped bugging us to play with them since we started the game. 

By the way, the other game mode is called Game of Drones (heh), where you all work together to catch holos scattered all over the playing field. You need to build the roads as usual, but you have to be wary of the hovering drones overhead who’re out to get you. We tried it out for a while, but somehow always end up spending hours and hours on Capture the Egg instead. I even came out of one gaming session with a sore throat at one point after all the screaming.

Can’t Drive This | Final Thoughts

I can’t stress how enjoyable Can’t Drive This really is, even more than PHOGS! Or Bonkies. I keep trying to come up with negative things to say about this game but I somehow always come up empty. While it does have a single-player mode, it's not meant to be played alone though, since that just takes away the fun of it all.

As an added little treat, performing gnarly stunts like cool flips in each match can help you unlock skins and decals for your car, like a wiener spoiler or a pair of pixelated “thug life” shades. They add a fun quirk to the gameplay, not that it really needs anything else to boost its fun factor.

TechRaptor reviewed Can’t Drive This on Nintendo Switch with a copy provided by the publisher. The game is also available on PlayStation 4, Playstation 5, Xbox One, and on Steam.