Racing games on the current gen consoles have been hit and miss (mostly miss) since the consoles launched. Forza 5 was a much smaller game than its predecessors, Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit and Horizon 2 were good games with short legs, DriveClub and The Crew were ambitious, open-world titles with very little curb appeal. Project CARS had been in an open development cycle for quite some time, and brought with it the hope that console gamers could enjoy the same type of top-tier sim racing that could be found only on the PC.
Project CARS gives players a great deal of freedom to choose the types of races and careers they want to participate in. Every car and track in the game is immediately available for racing, practice, and time trials. Players do not need to complete objectives to open a track or earn money to purchase vehicles. Project CARS is wide open and ready to roll from the start.
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Vehicles
Project CARS vehicle list is a modest collection of a handful of cars across several different racing genres: GT, prototype, karts, open wheel, road cars, etc. The sixty vehicles available at launch represent some of the finest cars in their respective classes.
Tracks
The tracklist is where Project CARS really shines. All of the familiar favorites from Forza and Gran Turismo are here, like Nurburgring, Le Mans, Bathurst, Hockenheim, Brands Hatch, Catalunya.While the real life tracklist is impressive, Project CARS has thrown in a few interesting fictitious and semi-fictitious tracks that are just as challenging as any real life track in the game. My immediate favorite time trial track was the California Highway, with a very tight and twisty road that eventually opens up for some top-end pavement roasting.
A Winning Concept
The game itself is intended to be a peripheral-friendly sim racer that promotes close, competitive racing. The cars can be tuned, but not upgraded, so that all racers on the field have a nearly identical car, which transfers a great deal of accountability from the garage to the driver’s seat. An awesome tune will not save you here, and drivers will have to rely on raw talent, braking, negotiating traffic, and capitalizing on others’ mistakes to advance on the track.
The game accepts a number of racing peripherals, so wheel racers who felt slighted with Forza 5’s initial lack of peripheral support may find Project CARS to be a very happy place for them and their toys.
Jason “Playschool” Cotter
X-Boned
Here’s where shit goes downhill. Trying to play this game on the XB1 is like trying to wash your face with salt and sandpaper. The cars are monumentally inconsistent, especially when using the controller. Even after doing a little internet research, the suggested settings for the cars simply did not help. My SLS suffered from every steering malady conceivable, from going wide on sweepers to locking into uncontrollable oversteer on tighter turns.
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The animation chugs and becomes more pronounced when there are more cars and action onscreen. I’m sure that the developer was not shooting for shitty handling and framerate issues, but that’s what we got. SlightlyMad has promised a patch to address these issues, but it never should have been released in this shape to begin with. I could only play for ten or fifteen minutes before becoming discouraged and turning to cat videos on YouTube for solace.
Sarcasmo Says
While Project Cars is not necessarily my kind of racing game, it is a sim racer’s paradise. If you’re the type of racer who likes the “everybody drive the same shit” races, then this is a must have, but only if you’re playing on the PS4 or PC, because the Xbox One version is a broken piece of shit. Project CARS, on the Xbox One, is a rental that can only be endured in small doses. Wait for the patch, amigo.
