Deal | Rather fix cars than drive them? 95%-rated game hits $2.50 for the first time on Steam

Car Mechanic Simulator 2021 is all about cars, but players spend surprisingly little time driving them. Instead, they take over a modest repair shop, accept customer jobs and gradually build it into a thriving automotive service business. According to SteamDB, the Steam Deck–verified game (currently available on Amazon for $740) is available with a 90% discount for the first time ever, dropping the price from $24.99 to just $2.49. The offer is only available for two days, however. It began on July 13 and ends on July 14 at 1:00 p.m. EDT.

The core gameplay loop revolves around diagnosing faults, disassembling vehicles, replacing parts and putting everything back together. Some jobs involve little more than changing brakes or fluids, while others require players to strip down an entire engine. The game is more detailed than it may first appear, featuring more than 4,000 individual parts and 72 vehicles. Driving is limited to the test track, but there is plenty to do outside of regular repair jobs. Players can visit auctions, junkyards and abandoned barns to discover neglected vehicles, restore them from the ground up, repaint and tune them, then sell them for a profit. The money earned can be invested in new tools, larger workspaces and better equipment.

On Steam, Car Mechanic Simulator 2021 enjoys an excellent reputation, with 90% of nearly 38,000 user reviews being positive. Critics were somewhat less enthusiastic. Gamepressure awarded the game 7 out of 10, and Metacritic paints a similar picture with a Metascore of 70 and a User Score of 7.2. While reviewers described the gameplay as enjoyable and highly satisfying, they also felt that the experience becomes repetitive fairly quickly. According to Gamepressure, the gameplay is quite rigid and leaves little room for creative solutions. Still, at a price of just $2.50, many car enthusiasts are likely to overlook those shortcomings.

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