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Cars ds Game Reviews
Cars
Critic Score
Metascore: 54 Metascore out of 100
User Score  
1.5 out of 10
based on 17 reviews
Read critic reviews
How did we calculate this?
based on 7 votes
Read user comments
Rate this game

Race to the finish line as you live all the fun and excitement of the Walt Disney Pictures presentation of a Pixar Animation Studios film, "Cars." Play as all your favorite characters as you help Lightning McQueen capture the coveted Piston Cup Championship. The game is a story-based racing adventure game that relives all of the key moments of the movie. It features more than 10 playable characters from the film and an open world environment with more than 50 races. [THQ]

PUBLISHER: THQ
DEVELOPER: Helixe
GENRE(S): Action, Adventure, Racing
PLAYERS: 1
ESRB RATING: E (Everyone)
RELEASE DATE: June 6, 2006

What The Critics Said

All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...

74
Official Nintendo Magazine UK
Slick, polished and surprisingly varied for a movie tie-in, this is one piece of blockbuster merchandise that's worth checking out. Just don't buy it for an easily aggravated child. [Oct 2006, p.94]
70
Worth Playing
A fun game that is quite adequate as a distraction for its target audience. For an adult, on the other hand, the game has only rare moments that qualify as entertainment.
Read Full Review
65
GameSpot
Compared to so many other movie-inspired games, Cars for the Nintendo DS is genuinely one of the more interesting ones. The care that went into each of the different minigames is impressive. Unfortunately, there just aren't enough of them here to hold a person's attention for very long.
Read Full Review
60
NintendoWorldReport
Cars for the DS is not a terrible licensed game; in fact, it is beautifully presented and even includes some clever mini-game ideas. But it never surmounts the feeling that these mini-games should have been a side offering to a real, main game that just doesn't exist.
Read Full Review
60
Pocket Gamer UK
But with even the most thumb-tied tot capable of completing Cars DS in less than five hours, any Pocket Gamer reader is likely to end up feeling pretty shortchanged.
Read Full Review
58
IGN
The actual race that ties the mini-games together is absolutely terrible, and easily the biggest stigma.
Read Full Review
55
Nintendo Power
Unfortunately, many of the mini-games don't work well, and the difficulty levels are way out of whack. [Aug 2006, p.86]
50
Games Radar
There's a two-player, multi-cart wireless mode to try with friends, but it's nothing that’s gonna keep you interested for long, and the bland Piston Cup races aren't exciting by yourself anyway.
Read Full Review
50
Digital Entertainment News
I feel bad giving this game a terrible rating, because it wasn't terrible. It just wasn't really that good, either. If you're a big fan of the movie, it might, maybe, be worth a look, but you'd probably be better served by a full console version.
Read Full Review
50
GamerFeed
The mini games are fun but it also feels like the game can get pretty repetitious.
Read Full Review
49
GameZone
Cars is an incredibly boring, sometimes frustrating, waste of a good DS cartridge. Do your kid a favor and buy them Mario Kart DS instead. They may scream and holler a bit, but after they compare it to their friend’s copy of Cars they will thank you.
Read Full Review
45
eToychest
Cars for the DS is short, frustrating, and uninspired, and with so many versions available, there is absolutely no reason to pick this one up.
Read Full Review
40
Yahoo! Games
Even if you're absolutely infatuated with the Cars premise, this is no way to show the love.
Read Full Review
40
WHAM! Gaming
What most definitely works for mini-game compendiums like Wario Ware or Mario Party certainly doesn't work for Cars, because of its complete lack of variety and quantity of individual levels, not to mention the wild variation in difficulty.
Read Full Review
40
Deeko
Even the most die hard fans of the movie will probably not enjoy it, and certainly a younger child would get frustrated way too quickly with some of the harder mini games. Given all these factors, I wouldn't recommend Cars (DS) to anyone. Not even for a rental.
Read Full Review
30
GameSpy
There's no real story to hold any of this together, so in the end, Cars for the DS amounts to nothing more than some disjointed mini-games that are either too drab or too long to warrant unnecessary replays.
Read Full Review
30
AceGamez
Cars is simply a small collection of novelty mini-games with few redeeming features, other than making good use of all the characters from the film.
Read Full Review

What Our Users Said

Vote Now! The average user rating for this game is 1.5 (out of 10) based on 7 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

Bjorn K. gave it a3:
Simply boring and my son was so unhappy with this game, Mario Kart is a billion times better, forget this game! Such a waste of money!

Mr Nobody gave it a3:
2nd. Worst. DS. Game. Ever. (Apart from that Crash game)

Toc R. gave it a1:
This game is hard for young children to figure out. It does not hold one's attention very long. I would not recommend for younger players.

Kung Fu Furby gave it a3:
The game was not very good. The vocals were fine, and graphics were fine, but who cranked up the difficulty? Some of these games had me trying to get a method until I could finally get it! Actually, there were some that took some getting used to, but forget this. The game was beat in a short time (not a single session), and... well, the game gets abandoned because there's not really any replay value in this game. I have one question. Where's the DS Download Play mode? That could have helped a lot! Then we could have at least some fun without having 2 copies of Cars! I frown upon the multiplayer feature because of this bug. It would have been easy to do so, seeing there's only 2 players and... there's not a lot of vareity. Only 2 cars. Sorry, doc, you could do better. The GameCube version did better. Get the GameCube/PS2/XBox version instead.

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