Project Cars is partly crowd-funded racer has tapped an audience that other racers seemed to be ignoring. People do seem to want a game with a fairly straight race-by-race, championship by championship career mode, the option to play full race weekends, a realistic approach to tyre wear and damage and AI racers that are neither robotic nor psychotic. Project Cars delivers on all these counts.
The multiplayer is a little bare bones and lacking in excitement, but you can find a race quickly and the action’s pretty stable.
We like the way that the game focuses on the nuts and bolts of racing, not on tinkering or social rivalries, but a little more interaction that way wouldn’t hurt.
Most seriously, while Project Cars has dazzling graphics, beautifully-modelled cars, convincing weather and a great tyre-wear and damage simulation, it still feels slightly rough around the edges.
When everything works and with the right control configuration, Project Cars is the strongest sim-style racer on console platforms, and the best all-rounder on PC.
The Career mode plays like the old Race Driver career mode, but with all the old cut-scene filtered out.
Project Cars has depth and variety as well. A rich mix of karts, superkarts, open-wheel racing and road races, all organised into seasonal championships and one-off invitationals. Amongst the courses you’ll find a good range of homegrown UK favourites, European classics, the US and Aussie tracks, plus a handful of fantasy road courses based on the Cote d’Azur and the Californian freeways, amongst others. The car list might be no match for Forza or GT, but most of the big marques and models are in place, with a few real beauties like the McLaren P1, the Gumpert Apollo, the Pagani Huarya and the Aston Martin Rapide S.
Right now this is the best-looking racer around crammed with beautiful cars, gorgeous, detailed scenery, rich, naturalistic lighting and superb weather effects. It’s cockpit views might not be the last word in authenticity, but they’re impressively immersive, going one better than rivals with a helmet cam that begs for a VR racing setup.
And when Project Cars gets the racing right, it gets it really right. The AI plays smart without playing mindlessly aggressive, so you need to work to keep ahead and playing well demands a certain level of skill. You can adjust everything from race lengths to pit stop strategies and car setups, or simply coast from event to event with the tyre wear and damage dialled down, taking pit stops when you’re called in. It’s up to you.
We’re not sure if this is just a subjective feeling, or the complex interactions of different cars, different setups and different tracks, but it seems odd that you can go from not winning anything to winning everything within the space of a season though nothing has changed.
Project Cars can feel like it’s giving you a choice between dumbed-down racer and more hardcore sim.
Meanwhile, the career structure doesn’t do the best job of exposing the riches on offer. The plus side is that you’re left to focus on your current contracts and championships without being whisked off for some rubbish drift event, but the downside is that you can be left stuck in a rut, waiting for something new to come along and break things up a little.
In terms of looks, style, ambition and attitude it’s already on the right track. It would only take the kind of attention we’ve seen Evolution Studios put into Driveclub to transform it from a contender to a champ.
