How is that even possible? It is another example of how bad sound design can have a detrimental impact on a game, I’m afraid.Ĭontent wise, and the picture is a lot rosier.

Even weirder, Mater, a battered rusty old tow truck, sounds just like Lightning, a thoroughbred NASCAR racer. You’re driving a “precision mix of speed and aeromatics” as Mater would say, but the engines are a vague kind of hum in the background. It’s not just the character voices that are flat and uninspiring, the engine sounds are the limpest I’ve ever heard on a video game. As my son said when I asked him about this – “You could just say everyone doesn’t sound right!”. This affects all areas of the game, as even in the heat of a race event, your chosen character will keep chatting away to themselves and taunting the rivals, so it is inescapable. My son and I must have seen the Cars movies hundreds of times, without a word of exaggeration, and to suddenly be presented with a game where they look right, but sound all wrong, is jarring at best, and downright off-putting at worst. I can’t stress enough how much of a disappointment this is.

It’s the same story with the rest of the Cars Mater sounds like a generic American South accent, Sally has changed to someone doing a bad American accent, and so on. I can do a more accurate “Ka-Chow” than whoever the voice actor is in this game, and that’s saying something with my broad Northern accent. It appears that the licence to produce a Cars 3 game didn’t include access to any of the voice talent, and so Lightning sounds like someone doing an impression of a drunk Owen Wilson down a bad mobile phone connection. As soon as Lightning opened his mouth, as he does whenever you pick him as a character, my son’s head snapped up… “That’s not Lightning, Daddy!”. These range from the new main rival, the all-electric Jackson Storm, to older characters pulled from racing history, from Doc’s vintage and even older. There are a number of new characters as well that can be picked from the roster and unlocked as you progress in the game. So the graphics are obviously doing their job.

My six year old son – who is acting as co-reviewer on this piece with me – was very excited by the visuals, shouting out the characters’ names as they appeared. Graphically this game is absolutely fine, the models of the Cars characters themselves are modelled impressively and look exactly as they should, right down to individual stickers on Lightning and rust patches on Mater. First impressions are good, with the attract sequence looking like it was ripped straight from the films.

Metacritic cars 3 driven to win