Can't Drive This

I've run a lot of Saturday night co-op sessions, and the games that actually work are the ones where a non-gamer can understand the whole premise in about eight seconds. Can't Drive This clears that bar easily: one player drives a monster truck and must never slow down, or the truck explodes. The other player builds the road in real time using randomised tiles that drop into their hands one at a time. Neither player controls both things at once, which means every single failure is loudly and enthusiastically someone else's fault. That tension between cooperation and blame is the entire engine of the game, and Pixel Maniacs have tuned it beautifully. The four modes give you just enough variety to fill an evening without overstaying their welcome. Yardage is the purest distillation: one builder, up to three drivers, all trying to survive as long as possible. Game of Drones layers in a level-progression structure where you collect holo tokens to advance, while drones overhead drop EMP mines to temporarily kill the truck dead mid-sprint, which causes genuine panic every single time. Capture the Egg is a four-player local-only mode that pits two driver-builder teams against each other in a capture-the-flag format, except the flag is a 300-pound concrete egg tethered to the truck, and it gets snagged on absolutely everything. That mode alone is worth getting four people in the same room for. Lone Racer, the single-player option that has you switching between builder and driver manually, is functional but joyless. Skip it. The builder role deserves more attention than it usually gets in write-ups. Tiles are predetermined and arrive in a random order. You can rotate them, but you cannot hold them back or undo a placement once it hits the grid. So if a sharp left-hand curve drops when you needed a straight, and the driver is already barrelling toward the gap you just created, the only thing left to do is scream. Road pieces include basic squares, curves, ramps, speed boosts, and flaming rings, which escalate the chaos nicely as a run extends. A good builder develops a kind of spatial instinct for reading the driver's speed and placing pieces just far enough ahead. A bad builder just makes the truck fly off the edge repeatedly, which is somehow equally entertaining for spectators. The honest caveats: the content is thin. Critics and players alike have noted that the four modes feel structurally similar to each other, and the only long-term progression is a cosmetic unlock system, earned by pulling off stunts as the driver or surviving specific challenges. A vehicle editor and a road editor are included for extra mileage, and the cosmetics themselves are genuinely silly in a good way, including spoilers that look like wieners and pixelated sunglasses. But once the group has cycled through all four modes a few times in an evening, there is not a huge amount pulling you back for a fifth session the following week. The online player pool is also thin, so treat online as a fallback for when you can't get people on the couch, not a primary mode. For the specific question of "is it fun for four people on a Saturday night", the answer is yes, without much qualification. Controls are a gamepad-friendly instant pickup, no racing wheel required, no genre literacy needed. The round length averages a handful of minutes at most, so anyone can rotate in. The game runs cleanly in split-screen with no notable slowdown. If you have the crew for it, Can't Drive This delivers exactly what it promises and wastes none of your time getting there.

Riley · Scout Team

Sports & racing

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