Physics-based puzzlers are essentially exercises in cause and effect. Based on what's happened before, you push an object out into the game world and expect it to react in a specific way.
If that reaction is different from the one you expected, you lose faith. There needs to be a reliability to proceedings - a contract between player and game stating that one thing crashing into another thing is always going to have the same result.
Car Toons! adheres to the terms of that contract from the first time you push a car off the edge of a ledge to the last. While it might have a slovenly opening section, it soon slots into gear and drives into the enjoyment lane.
Keep on truckingAt the core of the game, all you're doing is tapping police cars, fire engines, and ambulances. A single tap sets a vehicle driving in the direction it's facing, and another brings it screeching to an eventual halt.
To start with, all you have to do is move vehicles from one spot to another, but it doesn't take long for the game to throw some villains at you, and these need to be handled with severe prejudice.
The game slowly ratchets up its difficulty level, adding disappearing blocks, switches that you need to push before you can dispose of criminals, and rickety contraptions that buckle and collapse under the spin of your righteous wheels.
Police (gravitational) forceVehicles get their own special moves, as well - rocket boosters for the fire engines, cheeky jumps for the ambulances, and swift about-turns for the police cars are all required to complete levels later in the game.
And there are plenty of levels to complete, with more than a hundred to push your way through, and yet more promised in the not too distant future.
Car Toons! is an entertaining, occasionally head-scratching experience. There are moments of frustration, and the opening few levels may well fail to grab your attention, but if you persevere with it you'll find a finely balanced physics-puzzler with a sense of humour and more than a few clever tricks up its sleeve.Car Toons!
Clever, well-designed, and occasionally pretty special, Car Toons! is well worth a try for anyone with even a passing interest in physics-puzzlers
Harry Slater
Harry used to be really good at Snake on the Nokia 5110. Apparently though, digital snake wrangling isn't a proper job, so now he writes words about games instead.