CityDriver

I went into CityDriver expecting the kind of methodical, systems-heavy experience that Aerosoft-published sims usually deliver. What I found instead was a concept with genuine bones that has been shipped before the concrete fully set. The idea is sound: a 1:1 scale recreation of Munich's city centre, Autobahn sections included, where you pick from a roster of sedans, coupes, compacts, electric vehicles, and transit vans, then choose between automatic, sequential, or manual gearboxes. You can toggle traffic rules on or off, enable or disable AI collisions, and tune a surprisingly granular set of assists - automatic clutch, engine stall behavior, gear lever brake lock. For a sim-leaning audience, that settings depth is a good sign on paper. The core Freeplay mode is where most players will spend their time. You spawn at a location of your choosing, random tasks surface as you drive, and you can accept or decline them without consequence. There is also a dedicated Driving Practice Training area with slalom and avoidance challenges, which is a reasonable low-stakes onramp for people who want to learn the traffic ruleset before merging with live AI. The tutorial covers road basics and there is an in-game manual for reference, so newcomers are not left completely in the dark. If you approach CityDriver the way you would a train sim - find a quiet road, respect the speed limits, enjoy the landmarks - there is a low-pressure hour or two of genuine atmosphere here. The problems surface fast and compound quickly. The AI traffic is essentially decorative: drivers do not react to your presence, they wander into you, and there are zero consequences for running red lights, speeding, or T-boning a parked car. No damage model, no fines, no reset. For a game billing itself around realistic urban driving rules, the absence of any feedback loop when you break those rules is a fundamental design contradiction. Steering on keyboard or standard controller feels light and disconnected, and steering wheel support has been widely criticized as inconsistent despite the game nominally accommodating force-feedback rigs. Performance compounds the frustration - stutters, asset pop-in, and occasional freezes appear across hardware tiers regardless of the quality preset selected. The vehicle pool is thin at base, which makes the Steam Workshop support genuinely important. Community modding tools are included, and players can share and download custom cars, which is the realistic long-term path to making this roster feel less repetitive. The Autobahn Nord expansion adds highway sections along the A9, B471, and A99, plus pickup and delivery missions, giving players who exhaust the base content somewhere to go. But the fact that expansions and mods are doing structural work the base game should be doing is a pattern that defines the CityDriver experience overall. The foundation is real. A 1:1 Munich with manual transmission support, refueling stops, a photo mode, and an in-car radio is not nothing. It just needed significantly more time in development before asking anyone to pay for it.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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