Let’s make some rules: When everyone else is parking straight and there are clear indications of those spots, you have no legal right to take up two spaces. Let’s also say that if you have two garages and two cars, you either at the very least park those two cars in front of those garages or I get to call you very rude words. If it isn’t clear just yet, the parking around my way is a nightmare. Full of idiots and several successive expletives that I’m not allowed to repeat on the internet. So when I saw an email about a game called You Suck At Parking, I thought, what better time to incriminate myself before I commit a couple of murders with a bloody claw-hammer?

An arcade beat-the-clock puzzle game, You Suck At Parking sets you off on an adventure of trying to park in a tight area within an allotted time. Something I am sure the internet would collectively like to say is as wacky as a bloke that tried to catch a pigeon in hastily constructed flying machines in 1969. There are none of your Coolmath Games here, out with your Parking Fury 2 and all that. We have big cartoonish fans, launch pads with different attributes, teleports, massive magnets, and even insta-death barricades here, to name a few. We also have something I usually loathe in the world of games, leaderboards.

Akin to Hotline Miami, 10 second Ninja, and even Sonic Mania, you’ll impulsively build up a reflex to restart the very second something goes wrong. Handling surprisingly well, the car/van/truck you take on your attempts has what I’d describe as a weighted arcade-y feeling about them, easy to throw into a corner but not entirely controllable. So match those two things with leaderboards, and you’ve got yourself some nail-clenching screams at 3 AM when you’re 0.3 of a second off the world record. The trouble I found a majority of the time was the basic quality-of-life things, UI and UX (User eXperience).

For example, the pause menu has a couple of options on the bottom left: Restart, Level Select (from that landmark), To Island (to select landmarks), and the Main Menu. Up in the top right is the settings, which you have to press the pause button again to access. The level reset button, which we lord Hotline Miami for making so popular recently, isn’t told to you or at least clearly enough. With no reverse button (“Reversing is for the weak!”) you can also reset the car by pressing down on the direction buttons. Though the way the “handy” infographic of the direction buttons has up in white and the other three directions in black, I thought I had to press up.

If there is one weakness to the gameplay of You Suck At Parking, it has to be the curve of difficulty. Much like some of those obstacles that you’ll take on, they will be a loop-the-loop of maddening puzzles you have no idea how to solve, no less how to complete it in 11.3 seconds. I’m looking at you “[Dev] Carpet.” Sure, the inspection tool that’s available before every level lets you see where all the parking spots are but it lacks any intuitive way to complete the levels quickly. Especially when some of those levels have obstacles that knock you or pull you about the place, making quite a few of those “deaths” feel cheap.

Though I do enjoy You Suck At Parking for what it is, there is a lot that could be done to improve the overall experience, such as the ability to know which way you’re going to land when being punted around the level. I’m also not much of a fan when it comes to the live-service “Parking Pass” seasons, not because Happy Volcano did anything egregious with it, just a personal disliking towards systems like that. Though I think it should be noted that during the review period, the in-game store and premium pass for all the cosmetics were unavailable to even view. This is why several reviews, including this one, may not talk too much about that.

Ultimately, while I think You Suck At Parking is fun in the moments of victory, the overall frustration and standard gameplay which could be replicated reasonably quickly makes it finally forgettable. In fact, it wasn’t until writing this that I drilled the title itself into my head. I’ve no idea why “Your Parking Sucks” stuck in my head for so long. Maybe if there was a more linear, direct path for levels to progress and increase in difficulty, I may have enjoyed You Suck At Parking more. You Suck At Parking indeed found its way to its Game Pass parking spot, but it came in after being blown up by a mine, on three tires, and abandoned skew-whiff in the spot.

An Xbox One copy of You Suck At Parking was provided by Happy Volcano for this review.

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You Suck At Parking

$19.99

6.5

Score

6.5/10

Pros

• The "Weighted Arcade-y" Handling
• The Colorful and Cartoonish Aesthetic

Cons

• A Sense of Lacking Total Control
• Some UI/UX Decisions