A peak “dad” game and another one of those low-budget simulators from Eastern Europe that I still can’t decide whether I should be supporting or not. As someone who enjoys taking the time and effort to care for my car in real life, Car Detailing Simulator had an appeal to me.

Starting off with the graphics & design, the game is good to look at. It’s not reinventing the wheel, but you can tell there was attention paid to the cars and your garage. Whether the car models are from an asset shop or not, I can’t say, but they pop. You can see the water beads on the exterior and there’s a nice metallic shine when you polish it up. The interiors are a little more uniform. You work on cars from a myriad of decades, but they all have similar seat layouts, & identical floor mats. The interior sort of broke the illusion of working on classic cars for me. There’s also no variety in the dirt. That sounds odd, but every car has the exact same dirt pattern around its exterior, every dirty seat looks like the last 20. It would’ve been nice to have some variety, maybe have one car’s seats stained with wine, the next caked with mud.

You start out working in a metal shed of a garage with not much to look at, but when you move into your proper shop, you can see the attention to giving you an interesting place to work. There’s posters and pedestals for your display cars and you can unlock customization options to chose the flooring and wall colors of your liking. The music is a smattering of generic rock and roll tunes. It’s fine for the first hour, but after that I cranked down the in-game music & put on my own music or podcasts.

The main draw here is the gameplay, going through the process of professionally detailing cars. You have a checklist for each car that comes in: washing it, cleaning windows, repair seats, polish, etc. There is a certain order to how you have to perform each task, you can’t polish the car before washing it. Each task is handled as a little mini game that usually involves dragging your mouse around a surface to mimic a hand motion. But you’re a professional detailer, so you aren’t a “weekend warrior” out there with just a car sponge and dish soap. They actually partnered with a car detailing brand/shop called Ammo, so all of your spray and foam bottles and polishers have a nice big Ammo logo on them. The game can be a bit inconsistent on what it considers “complete”, especially in regards to polishing. There were times I polished 85% of the car & it checked it off my list, other times I had to hunt down every little hidden scratch and ding. That was the most frustrating part of the game. You can take photos of your finished work which allows you to access a slider that shows you the car before and after your work. It's a nice touch that gives you a visual feedback on your accomplisment.

CDS doesn’t go too hard into the paint in regard to being a simulator. You can hose a car down and let it sit without worrying about it air drying and developing water spots. Your bottles of soap and polish never run dry, you don’t have to restock them or try to work in the most efficient way. You don’t have to match paints for your touch up jobs. If you are looking for something with a bit more realism or components to it, you’re out of luck. Most jobs have an unlimited time limit, which I don’t mind. There was only one car I had to get done in a set amount of time.

As you progress through the game and build up some money, you can spend it at a shop on new tool kits that let you clean headlights or repair deep scratches. There’s “pro” versions of all your tool kits. Some give you extra tools to do more jobs with, others make a certain job easier, such as the interior cleaning kit, and others don’t seem to have a real noticeable different from the basic version. When you make the big bucks, you can buy your own cars from an auction house to clean up and turn around for a profit. You can buy property as well. I’ve mentioned your upgraded garage, but you can also buy a show room to display your cars in, but I’ll admit I’m not sure if it works right. The car management system is a bit finicky and cryptic. It’s an area that needs improvement.

I found there’s a juggling act between working on customer cars and your own cars. You get more money selling your own cars, but you get reputation from doing customer work, which is needed to win the 1st place trophy in the car detailer awards. You can also test drive your cars on a racetrack. It’s a bare bones mode with all the cars handling the same and is more there for the novelty. That being said, I still appreciate it’s inclusion. Luckily if you take a clean car out on the track it doesn’t get dirty, no matter how many concrete barricades you crash into.

To my surprise there is a lite story to this game. It’s told through comic panel style cutscenes, and basically just sets up that you worked for a top tier detailer, but his business flooded so you have to start at the bottom. As you climb the ranks towards first place, your boss offers you the old garage. You clean it up and keep climbing closer to 1st place. Each job you take has a little blurb from the owner ala House Flippers that usually has some silliness to it, like “I drove through the bushes to get home quicker and now my car’s scratched up.”

Moving into the new garage and unlocking most of the pro tool kits is about the middle point of the campaign. After that the game doesn’t really have anything new to throw at you. If you’ve not been enjoying your time, then pull chute now, because nothings going to change. This game got it’s hooks in me though. I had the Civilization problem of “Just one more car”. The rhythm of working on cars and learning new ways to get them done quicker was enticing. It also helps this game smartly has a wide selection of cool cars to work on. Your first car or two are generic modern sedans, but you quickly move into washing Dodge Challengers, classic Mustangs, Studebakers, old Chevy trucks. Cars that are interesting to look at and would be a blast to work on in real life. Of course, they can’t use the real names and logos, so instead of a Dodge Charger, you detail a Charge Dodger. You still work on the occasional modern car, like a Ford Focus or Jeep Grand Cherokee, but giving you classic cars early was a smart move.

All in all, this game is not a thrill a minute or a detailed look into the life of a car detailer. It’s definitely a low key, chill out game in the vein of House Flipper or Lawnmower Simulator. If you are a person that enjoys seeing the fruits of your labor after a day of cleaning, this is your game. That being said, it’s a basic experience & I recommend getting it on sale, because even $15 is a bit much for what’s on offer. If this game was released back in the day, it would squarely be in that budget PC game shelf at Walmart, you know, the ones they don’t bother putting behind glass.