Parent's Guide: Cars 3: Driven to Win - Age rating, mature content and difficulty

What is Cars 3: Driven to Win?

From the team that brought you Disney Infinity, Cars 3: Driven to Win is the perfect tie-in racer. With 20 playable (and customisable) characters to play as, from Lightning McQueen and Mater, to the little forklift truck Guido and giant schoolbus Miss Fritter, along with support for four player split-screen play across the entire game (!!), this the perfect game to play with your family, friends, and/or significant other. Ka-chow!

How do you play Cars 3: Driven to Win?

With pick up and play, arcade style gameplay, Cars 3 offers a variety of modes to test your driving skills against, with 20 unique tracks to choose from, including some returning favourites from earlier games. From normal Races and Battle Races (like a race, just with weapons), to more unusual modes like Stunt Showcase (hit as many jumps and ramps as you can, performing tricks to earn the most points) or Takedown (race around a track, and blow up as many waves of crash karts as you can), there's a lot of variety here. There's even an open world hub to explore, packed with challenges, and a handful of collectables.

No matter which mode you play, though, one of the most impressive things about Cars 3 is that anything and everything here can be played in split-screen with up to four players. There's even some co-op cups here, that let you and your friends (or some computer controlled buddies if you're playing on your own) team up to take on a team of computer controlled racers over a series of tracks. To give you plenty of reason to keep coming back, the game also tracks your progress towards completing its "Hall of Fame", a collection of 136 challenges to achieve across all of the game's many modes, from finishing a race while driving backwards, to using rockets a certain number of times, meaning there's always something new to work towards.

How easy is Cars 3: Driven to Win to pick up and play?

With accessibility in mind, Cars 3 is a game that's easy to pick up and play - although if you want to reliably come in first place, you'll have to learn how to do a few tricks.

The basic controls are simple to get to grips with - you steer your car with the left stick, drift by pressing Circle (on PS4) to charge your boost gauge, and boost by pressing Square. It's the right stick that'll let you take your game to the next level, though, as pushing this left or right will let you side swipe opponents (sometimes causing them to spin out), while pushing it up flips you onto two wheels (which charges your boost gauge), and flicking it down lets you drive backwards (ditto). Flicking the right stick when in mid air will also let you pull off tricks, netting you some extra boost power.

With three different difficulty levels to try your skills against, you can tailor the challenge in Cars 3 to suit - and the game won't punish you for it. Each race lets you earn one of three stars depending on where you finish, but you can earn all three by playing on Easy - similarly, there's nothing locked off to players on the easiest difficulty. That said, even on Easy the computer players can often put up a fight - while they won't use shortcuts as often as on the harder difficulties, they're still fast, nimble, and often quite tricky to beat, particularly on the Stunt Showcase races. That said, winning is far from impossible - and split-screen play means you can work together as a team.

For the youngest of players, the vast majority of Cars 3 is fully voiced, with the only really important reading being a few brief tutorial prompts that appear during the game's first race - usually simply telling you to drift by pressing circle, etc. The game is also fully subtitled.

With nothing in the way of bad language, sexual content, or violence, there's nothing for parents to worry about in Cars 3. While certain races give you the ability to use weapons, you never really see any damage being done - explosions may cause cars to flip or fly into the air, but they'll be back on track a few seconds later.

Age Ratings

Format Reviewed: Playstation 4