The developer, Rainbow Studios, focused on Story Mode, which houses a recreated town from the movie called Radiator Springs as the free-roaming hub of activity. From this main hub, players can interact with many of the characters from the movie Cars, as well as accept races or challenges to progress the story with the ultimate goal of competing in numerous "Piston Cup" races.

The story for the game is told using recreated cut-scenes inspired from the movie, though the actual premise is non-linear and very fun!
Players do power sliding, jumping, and even driving backwards along the way. During pit stops, players race through a variety of Mini games including painting their vehicles or sneaking into the fields with Mater to do "Tractor Tipping”.

The controls are not as easy as I hoped especially since you use the mouse buttons to brake and hit the gas but the arrow keys to steers. Gameplay is based on simple controls, primarily focused on acceleration, braking and drifting with the ability to jump off the ground and pull off a few added moves as a bonus.

The sense of speed is a bit slow overall though the drifting is cause for a few more frustrating control issues. Initiating a drift is as simple as holding down the designated button but it's often ended far too quickly.
The objects within the environment are not destroyable and do not even move, which cheapens the experience since one of my favorite parts of a racing game is crashing and watching the pieces fly! The majority of gates, signs and fences won't budge when hit.

The presentation and gameplay is hurt a bit due to the clunky gamepad support. The game easily sensed that our pad was plugged in but for some odd reason the D-pad couldn't be used to navigate menus. It's a bit of a pain to navigate using both a controller and mouse or keyboard, and the lack of full controller support hurts the PC conversion a bit.

That being said, the game runs very smooth on even low-end machines and can display in any full screen resolution from 640 X 480 all the way to 1600 X 1200.

Colorblind gamers will have a lot of trouble with this because there are a lot of green and red stop lights with barely readable indicators. Also, the subtitles are in a white text and difficult to read on the various backgrounds.

At a Glance

Hearing
Some subtitles but they are hard to read on most backgrounds.
Recommended score: 3/10

Visual
Colorblind gamers will have difficulty reading stop lights but you can work around this.
Recommended rating: 5/10

Mobility
Difficult to play on the PC. Requires both mouse and keyboard. Not for one-handed gamers or those with low mobility.
Recommended score: 2/10