You Suck at Parking

My Saturday night co-op group has a rule: if someone suggests a new game, they have to survive 20 minutes of mockery before we actually load it up. You Suck at Parking survived about four minutes before everyone grabbed a controller. That tells you most of what you need to know. The core loop is genuinely weird in the best possible way. You pilot a tiny top-down car around obstacle-laden courses and the goal is to park in designated spots before the timer runs out. No reverse gear. Limited fuel. A respawn system that dumps a fresh car on track every time your current one gets incinerated, teleported, punched by a giant mechanical fist, or sucked into a fan. Each level has between two and five parking spots to hit, and nailing a clean run with a single car per spot earns the "perfect parking" accolade that unlocks bonus stages. The campaign spans two main biomes - standard asphalt and a deeply slippery winter island where ice poles can freeze your car solid mid-drift - across well over 100 levels arranged in a Mario-style island hub structure. Early levels ease you in gently. Then homing missiles and bullet-hell totems show up and suddenly you're screaming at a parking space. Handling lands somewhere between Micro Machines and Super Meat Boy. It's arcadey, floaty, and quick to pick up - accelerate, steer, brake, that's genuinely it - but threading a fast drift into a tight spot without overshooting takes real practice. The controls are responsive enough that failures feel earned rather than cheap, which is the magic ingredient that keeps this kind of game from becoming infuriating. The level designs themselves are inventive and rarely repeat visual gimmicks in the same way, though reviewers have flagged that the two biome art styles do start to blur together over a long session. Visual fatigue is a real thing here if you binge it hard. The online multiplayer takes the solo chaos and adds seven more people, all blasting around the same course simultaneously in a race to claim parking spots first. Up to eight players, cross-platform matchmaking, and a rotating pool of dedicated multiplayer maps. It is, as advertised, absolute bedlam - and it works. The competitive structure (most spots parked wins if nobody clears the board) makes it accessible to players of wildly different skill levels. One important note for couch-party hopefuls: there is no local split-screen or same-screen multiplayer. The Friends Party mode lets you host a session with pals online, but if your plan was to run this on a TV with four people sharing controllers, that's not the game right now. The community has been asking for it since launch, and it remains an online-only affair. For a game that screams "party room" in every screenshot, that gap stings. The XP and car customisation system gives you a reason to keep playing beyond the campaign - unlocking new vehicles and cosmetics through both solo and multiplayer progress. It's not deep, but it adds enough of a drip-feed to justify coming back. If you're a leaderboard chaser, the global rankings per level will absolutely eat your evening. Bottom line on hardware: any controller works fine here, no wheel or specialist peripheral needed. Keyboard is playable but a gamepad is noticeably better for the analogue steering precision. This is genuinely one of those games where being bad at it is still fun, which is a rarer quality than developers tend to admit.

Riley · Scout Team

Sports & racing

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