Car Mechanic Simulator 2021
BANGER · Strategy · 2021
Steam Deck VerifiedThe verdict
BUY IT.
A BANGER at $24.99.
- Length
- 24.2h
- Value
- $1.03/hr
- Reviews
- 96% positive
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Minimum on the Steam store: 8 GB of memory, NVidia GeForce GTX 760 2GB, 35 GB of storage. Windows only.
Work your way to a service empire. Get your hands dirty in a highly realistic simulation game that pays major attention to details. Pay a visit to a new Auction house and buy cars in various conditions. Expand your range of services by investing in a new work space and equipment.
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
It has never been cheaper than $3.24. That was August 2026. It has been discounted 54 times in the 5 years tracked here, typically at 52 percent off, with about 5 weeks between sales. Today it is at full price. The last sale was about 6 weeks ago, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 5 weeks.
Against its own genre it lands in the top 1 percent on value. It is pricier than 94 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 99 percent. Among the games closest to it, Car Mechanic Simulator 2018 ($19.99, scores 84) and BeamNG.drive ($24.99, scores 67) both come in lower.
Of the 800 Steam-purchase reviews this site sampled, 29 come from buyers who refunded the game, sampled from reviews written April 2025 to September 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 69 percent of the 1,256 reviews written there were positive, against 96 percent overall, and those are 3 percent of everything written about it.
24.2 hours to finish it, 104 to exhaust it. The completionist tail is 4.3 times the campaign.
5 years after release it still had 1.3K people in it at once.
Deck Verified, so no launch options and no controller remapping before it runs.
The drop-off
75% start to 3% rarestNo achievement in this game marks the ending, so there is no finish rate. The curve runs from the most-unlocked achievement to the rarest, and its shape is where players stop. Steam global achievements
Players
1,343 players at peak in the last day.
The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.
What players say
Generally really fun game. Being able to breakdown a car to almost bare-bones nothing and rebuild it is quite satisfying. Though it is very realistic in the way that as you're working, you realized you don't have the right part, then get to simulate being on the computer looking for the right parts to fix the issue.
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
No data upstream: critic score (Metacritic).
Cite this score
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Car Mechanic Simulator 2021 scores 96/100 on the BANG Score (a BANGER). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/1190000/car-mechanic-simulator-2021The BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Sep 15, price as of Sep 24.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.