Yeah I think you found a vehicle for the towing job that is purposefully broken down to make it a challenge to tow (I.e. the right front tire is totally flat so you have to lift the front with a winch for the tow). You only start with one vehicle (stinger) but there are various blue vehicles around you can drive for free to do jobs in exchange for a cut of your profits. Any vehicles you see with a yellow icon labeled “rescue request” on the map are vehicles intended to be recovered with a tow truck. You can get in them to “drive” them but that is just to facilitate repositioning them in order to help get them hooked into a tow truck. You cannot just get in and drive random vehicles in this game unless they are rental vehicles labeled with a blue icon.

Sorry you had a bad experience, it is definitely early access, I normally never recommend early access games it’s just there aren’t really any fleshed out alternatives of open world driving games with realistic physics and a large open worlds that even remotely try to do what Motor Town does, not to mention in a low poly graphics style well suited to lower end devices like the steam deck.

Yeah there are open world racing games, but that doesn’t really get at the vibe of Motor Town with all the vastly different kinds of vehicles and jobs all happening together at once. The closest peers like Forza or Beamng just don’t understand the basic gameplay loop of why Motor Town works so well, so while you might be able to get somewhat of a similar experience to parts of Motor Town elsewhere, even at this stage of development I think Motor Town provides a really unique fun that for a certain type of person is going to be an extremely addicting experience.

Some people will try the Motor Town demo and think “this is just all grinding driving jobs for money” and hate, people like me will have the same reaction and absolutely love it for focusing on that.

Controller support works no problem for me both with the steamdeck onboard controls and also with a gamepad when my steamdeck is docked. The game has premade bindings for controller that display onscreen and honestly driving with a controller gives you a massive advantage over mouse and keyboard given how subtle the vehicle handling is and how much easier it is to make smooth subtle adjustments with a controller.

There is a demo so you can see if it works for you.

I’m looking for a game with realistic handling where I can race down some roads with traffic.

Totally the right vibe for this game, just start out doing taxi jobs, turn on accepting urgent passengers and turn off accepting comfort passengers. Now you have a point to point racing game on roads with AI traffic (and also human players if you play online).

The starter taxi car doesn’t have crazy acceleration but go into your options and turn off all the steering and driving assists and put the car in sport mode and the car opens up a lot since the assists are there to help you drive calmly.

Still an early access game but the driving feel is just so good and you the customization of vehicles is so flexible that I don’t really care, it is a blast already. Also, jobs like delivery truck jobs might not usually be timed but the more jobs you do the more money you make… so even the jobs that aren’t framed as racing jobs you can totally treat like a racing game and soup up your delivery truck with an absurd engine.

The only job you can’t treat like a racing job is bus driving since you have to arrive on schedule and not too early (you can have AI drive bus routes for you while you drive a different car tho). Every other job you can just punch it and drive like an absolute psychopath. Think of it as a racing game about racing all kinds of different vehicles (wanna make a semi into a giant drift monster? You can do that) not just sports cars.

If you crank the settings yeah it won’t run well, but at lower settings that game runs fine even online in a multiplayer server with 30 people (though the net code is still a bit rough (I mean it’s a multiplayer physics game with multiple articulating physics pieces like 18 wheelers with trailers soooo) but that isn’t the steamdeck’s problem). It has a free demo, try it out to and see for yourself yooo

Because the graphics are stylized as low poly you are getting a whole lot of very advanced unreal engine physics delivered in a very resource efficient package. I bet Wreckfest runs as good at low graphics but Wreckfest defies logic with how well it runs.

Another good vehicle game that is fabulous for the steam deck is Offroad Mania. Opposite kind of game from Motor Town, very small bite sized rock crawling levels and procedurally generated endless obstacle runs. The game has superb physics, low poly graphics and runs like butter on the deck.

If your son is of the kid type “loves big machines that adults use to do work with” he will absolutely be obsessed with this game, I would have played the shit out of it when I was a kid. Wait I am playing the shit out of it, am I still a kid…?

Also, I get that it isn’t your type of game but if you can find a driving task you like doing in the game it is a really good way to spend time together, it is a superb social hangout game. Give the demo a try at least if your son ends up liking it!

I am utterly addicted to an early access game called Motor Town: Behind The Wheel. It sells itself as a driving simulator kind of like if Euro Truck Simulator not only had semis but also taxis, box trucks, garbage trucks, tow trucks, busses, sedans, SUVs vans, sports cars etc… you name it.

There are many different ways to earn money in the game from pizza delivery to logging trucking to driving a garbage truck to urgent taxi rides.

Because you can heavily customize and tune each vehicle, including being able to drop ridiculously powerful engines into vehicles, it means that while this game doesn’t sell itself as a racing game necessarily, it is one of the most fun racing games I have ever played. When I do deliveries with my box truck I’m not playing a chill simulator, I am hurtling a box truck across fields and power sliding around corners with my custom tuned v12 monster.

The physics are superb and it is just a blast to race around in the vastly different feeling vehicles.

What seals the addictive feel to the game is that it has an autopilot feature where your vehicle will automatically drive to waypoints so you can interact with this game anywhere along a continuum from a sort of idle game all the way to a balls to the wall open world racing game.

If you are the kind of person that enjoys just racing around in GTAV aimlessly rather than doing missions or if you love open world racing games like Burnout Paradise or if you want to play Euro Truck Simulator with your friends you will love Motor Town.

Motor Town has multiplayer and it is really fun to be on the same road networks as people playing the game in a totally different way than you. A lot of times semis and trucks go by in autopilot, sometimes you pass someone driving a logging truck like an utter psychopath addicted to speed, sometimes you pass a player loading a broken down vehicle onto their towtruck, sometimes you are racing along and see someone else racing in their souped up car and a mini informal street race happens. It is my ideal version of a chill social game, especially because again the driving mechanics/physics are superb, it is hard to go back to other games after it.

Finally, it runs awesome on the steam deck particularly because of the low poly graphics style (that might fool you into thinking the driving mechanics are arcadey but trust me they aren’t).

Lol for most of this conversation I was sure this was a total overhaul mod for Oblivion.

Which was the Trine that was panned on release, was it 4 or 5?

These losers better not do it to Monster Hunter World.

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Farm Together

Farm Together - been playing with my gf split screen co-op on tv. The game is exactly what it says on the tin and it is awesome.

Modded Dayz (using DZGUI as mod manager) - I have been working on a steamdeck joystick+gyro control scheme and playing a bunch of V++ deathmatch and other deathmatch servers. Dayz runs almost comically well on the steamdeck I really don’t get it. The gunplay is unbelievably chunky and intense especially on servers with carefully curated gun mods. I love it.

Halo Infinite - finally not hardcrashing on me all the time on the steamdeck, I love the original three halos and despite what old halo fans half paying attention will tell you, halo infinite’s multiplayer is superb. It doesn’t hurt that it is free.

Deep Rock Galactic - Is there anything to even say about this gem?

Battlebit - I am having fun, I love having battlefield without EA but the problem is like a lot of battlefields the gun balance is totallllyyyyyyyyy skewed in favor of smg players who blindly rush so I am just not playing it as much right now. I can hold my ground and fight mid range more effectively in halo infinite without being call of duty smg spam which kind of breaks my brain (the guns I am using to do so half the time don’t even have iron sights lol?). I hope they fix this game.

(I play all of these with joysticks + gyro, no mouse and keyboard)

Same it was infuriating to be like wow I am so close to an awesome multiplayer experience except it hard crashes my steam deck every 15 minutes lol.

Also I didnt bring this up before but yeah the integration of AI into forge mode is actually pretty massive especially because the halo enemy ai doesn’t need much scripting or fiddling to be fun to fight. The amount of crazy shit that will come out of forge mode with ai enemies is going to be hilarious.

Hahaha yes, I tried it the other day actually.

I am kind of curious about how far one can push joysticks+gyro. Can you play a quake style game competitively? I think I could, and I bet steering the rockets with gyro feels incredible. I haven’t gotten into making some bindings yet though.

Love me some quake (xonotic is the best quake style shooter imo), love me some halo.

edit just tried out xonotic on the steamdeck with joysticks+gyro, it works fantastic, just gotta figure out a way to map all the weapon switch keybindings in a way you can actually press them quickly. I guess you only realllllyy need rockets, mortar, rails and the blaster/rocket jump gun quickly accessible.