City Car Driving 2.0

City Car Driving 2.0 entered Early Access on Steam on June 16, 2026, developed and published by Forward Development, the studio behind the original City Car Driving, a driving-skills simulator that's spent nearly a decade helping novice drivers and sim racers alike practice real-world scenarios. This isn't a graduation or a rerelease of that original game; it's a ground-up sequel built on Unreal Engine, with its own distinct Steam listing and its own Early Access clock starting fresh at launch. What it inherits from its predecessor is a passionate, opinionated fanbase, and that fanbase's reception so far has been decidedly mixed.

A genuine technical rebuild, not a reskin

It's worth being clear about what City Car Driving 2.0 actually is before getting to its problems: several reviewers, including longtime modders of the original, explicitly credit the developer for recognizing that City Car Driving 1's aging engine had hit real limitations and rebuilding around Unreal Engine rather than continuing to patch an old foundation. That's a meaningfully different decision than simply re-releasing the same game with a new coat of paint, and it shows in genuine graphical improvements multiple reviewers acknowledge even while criticizing other aspects of the launch. The driving-skills premise carries over faithfully too: reviewers from Sweden and elsewhere in the EU specifically praise how accurately the traffic rules and right-of-way logic match real-world driving codes, useful enough that at least one reviewer credits the original game with genuinely helping them pass their real driving test.

What longtime fans say is missing

The sharpest, most consistent criticism doesn't come from newcomers unfamiliar with the franchise, it comes from longtime City Car Driving fans who specifically expected version 2.0 to build on the original rather than strip features from it. VR support, a defining feature of the first game, is absent entirely at launch despite carrying a VR tag on the store page, a discrepancy multiple reviewers call out directly and cite as a reason for refunding. Headtracking support, specifically TrackIR compatibility, is also missing, which one detailed review frames as more than a cosmetic loss: without it, the claustrophobic in-car view makes it genuinely difficult to see pedestrians while turning at intersections, undermining the exact kind of safety-focused practice the game is built around. Another reviewer states plainly that core driving-instruction tools present in the original, like an in-car instructor guiding a learner through maneuvers, appear to have been replaced with a more conventional career structure that several longtime fans feel drifts away from the franchise's original training-tool identity.

A small map and an uneven performance story

Content scope draws its own wave of complaints. The playable city is repeatedly described as tiny relative to the original game's map, with one reviewer specifically noting a single short highway with no merging lanes to practice on, a meaningful gap for a game whose entire value proposition is realistic driving-scenario practice. Performance reports are genuinely inconsistent across the review base: several players report smooth, high framerates even on demanding settings, while others describe rough, stuttering performance on comparable hardware, a split that suggests optimization issues affecting some configurations more than others rather than a uniformly broken build. One reviewer's system even rejected the game outright over VRAM requirements despite running a high-end 4080 Super card, a compatibility wrinkle worth flagging for anyone considering a purchase before further patches land.

The career mode's quest framing, for better and worse

City Car Driving 2.0 reframes its driving practice around a quest- and errand-driven career mode rather than a more clinical lesson structure, a change reviewers are split on. Several find it a welcome improvement, giving otherwise dry practice sessions a sense of purpose and making casual, low-stakes sessions more approachable for players who aren't studying for a driving test. Others, particularly fans of the original's more direct instructional format, feel the change dilutes the simulator's core identity, with one reviewer specifically requesting a return to a dedicated practice/instructor mode alongside the new career structure rather than as a replacement for it. Both readings are legitimate reactions to a genuine design pivot, not just nostalgia for its own sake, and the split is worth weighing against a given buyer's own reason for wanting a driving simulator in the first place.

Pricing against a game that isn't finished yet

At $29.99, City Car Driving 2.0 sits close to the original game's current price despite shipping with fewer confirmed features and a smaller map, a gap several reviewers raise directly rather than as an afterthought. One review argues the asking price feels more appropriate for a roughly $10-15 Early Access product given the current content scope, distinct from a complaint about the game's underlying quality; it's a value argument specifically about where this build sits in its own development arc rather than a judgment on whether the eventual finished game will be worth the money. That distinction matters for anyone weighing whether to buy in now to support development or wait: the driving fundamentals reviewers do praise are real, but paying full price today buys into a product several of its most invested fans describe as meaningfully behind where the original game already was.

A developer with a track record, now under pressure to prove it again

Forward Development's decade of continuous support for the original City Car Driving buys them a degree of patience from this community that a first-time developer likely wouldn't receive, and it shows in how many critical reviews frame their complaints as temporary rather than fundamental, explicitly saying they expect missing features like VR and headtracking to arrive in future updates rather than assuming they've been abandoned outright. That patience isn't unlimited, though; several reviewers specifically reference past delays to this sequel's launch and say their goodwill is wearing thin the longer core promised features stay absent. Whether City Car Driving 2.0 ultimately earns back that patience will likely determine more about its final reputation than anything present in this initial Early Access build.

Verdict

City Car Driving 2.0 is a genuine, ambitious technical rebuild of a well-regarded driving-skills simulator, and its core traffic-rule accuracy and wheel support remain real strengths, but its Early Access launch strips out headline features like VR and headtracking support that longtime fans specifically valued, backs them with a noticeably smaller map, and delivers inconsistent performance across similar hardware. At $29.99 for what several reviewers describe as less content than the original game already offered, this is one to watch through further patches rather than buy immediately, particularly for anyone drawn to the series specifically for its VR-based practice tools.