The Bottom Line
Gary Gadget Building Cars has the makings of a great educational game, but it falls a little short of the mark. It allows you to build your own car, but it doesn't allow all that much freedom of choice in terms of the parts you can use. Once your hot rod is complete, you can take it for a spin around the local countryside, but navigating it is awkward at best.
Despite its flaws, there's plenty to like about Gary Gadget Building Cars, and it's sure to be a hit with young kids who like to tinker. Kids much older than 5 or 6 will probably become quickly bored by the game's somewhat restrictive nature.
Pros
- Good replay value.
- Colorful storybook-style graphics.
- Lets you drive your car as well as build it.
- Challenging as well as creative.
Cons
- Activity window is small, with no option to switch to full-screen view.
- Instructions and help are limited for kids who aren't mechanically inclined.
- Design options are limited.
- Navigating the roads is awkward at best.
- Gary's comments can get repetitive and annoying.
Description
- CD includes Mac and Windows versions.
- Additional parts are available for downloading from the Gary Gadget web site (www.gary-gadget.com).
- A bonus game available for downloading from the Gary Gadget web site.
Guide Review - Gary Gadget Building Cars
Gary Gadget Building Cars is designed for budding grease monkeys and dedicated tinkerers. In addition to building a car, you can drive it around the countryside and enter it in an auto show.
Gary Gadget lives in a quiet spot at the end of a road, with Bouncer, his Boxer, and a colorful junkyard full of whatchamacallits, thingamabobs, and doodads. Using a point-and-click interface, you can poke around in all the piles of junk in Gary's garage and junkyard, and gather parts to build a car. Be careful not to get too carried away, though, or you'll have trouble making sense of the clutter. Disappointingly, you don't have free rein when it comes to building your car. You can gather all the parts you like, but if you try to add a part that doesn't logically fit, the game won't allow you to use it.
Once you appease the game and finish building your car, you can take it for a spin around the block and show it off to your neighbors. The neighborhood displays via an aerial map. You can navigate the roads using the arrow keys, or by clicking and dragging the mouse pointer (which turns into a steering wheel) in the direction you want to go. We found both methods to be equally awkward, and spent a frustrating amount of time trying to get the car going in the direction we wanted to go.
Building a roadworthy car is more difficult than you might expect. Sure, it looks good, but once you get behind the wheel, you might discover that it can't handle the road conditions. For example, if you pick the wrong tires for mud, you'll have to go back to the garage and do a little more tinkering. There aren't many parts to choose from at first, but that changes as you work your way through the game. You can also download more parts from Gary Gadget's web site.
