Car Mechanic Sim 2015

I never expected to become one of those people who enjoys serious simulators. I’ve always played games for escapism. Give me fantasy stories where I get to swing a sword and save everybody. Let me romance characters that are far more noble than anyone I could attract in the real world. Don’t tell my fiancé.

Yet I find something really relaxing about disassembling a car and putting it back together. I feel like I’m learning a useful skill, but without all the greasy mess, faffing about with tools or danger of actually being around grease-covered heavy machinery.

Car Mechanic Simulator 2015 has you working in a garage, taking repair jobs over the phone and slowly expanding your garage with more expensive tech. You start out with simple jobs that tell you the problem and explicitly list the parts you need to replace. If you’re feeling adventurous or actually know something about cars, you can whiz about your job as an ethereal ghost, magically able to reach the back of the engine. If you’re a complete numpty like myself, it’ll be faster to click the blue star to highlight the part you need. That doesn’t always help though – sometimes you can only see

As you gain experience, more complex jobs become available. You’ll get car symptoms and have to figure out the cause yourself. Hope you were paying attention on the early jobs. I took apart half the entire before learning that “Knocking noises from engine bay” was caused by a faulty “idler roller A”. A what? Yeah, I still don’t know what an idler roller assembly does for the engine but I do know to check it first when there’s a knocking noise. Progress!

You do have to be an ethical mechanic – there’s no dodgy meta-game here. It won’t let you steal good parts from cars and replace them with broken ones, nor can you “accidentally” leave out the air filter to bring the customer back for a second job. You can swap out great parts for slightly ropey ones if you’re so inclined, but since each job has a minimum quality threshold for parts, it won’t really save you much money. That said, once you gain a few levels, you can unlock repair tools to fix up broken parts, so the more valuable components could be worth hanging on to.

Money is more of a score-keeping exercise early on – you’ll rarely have to worry about being able to afford parts. After some time on the job, you’ll be a high enough level to buy a paint shop, test track and eventually a car park. This took me about 17 hours and is the last of the garage upgrades. From here you can buy cars at auction to fix up and either sell for more money, or proudly display in your car park.

So far I’ve learned all sorts of things. When a mechanic changes your oil for free? It probably means that s/he couldn’t figure out what the hell was wrong with the engine and took it apart unnecessarily. Noisy car? Check the exhaust. Poor steering? Could be anything.

Car Mechanic Simulator 2015 isn’t going to set your world on fire, but there’s a quiet satisfaction in tracking down that annoying faulty rubber bushing and putting in a new one. Get your overalls out and learn what’s actually under that hood.