Project CARS review: A PC racing simulator that’s unapologetically for gearheads
National Post Tech Desk - Fri, 05/08/2015 - 07:43
Project CARS knows exactly what it wants to be: A hardcore racing simulator.
This is perhaps to be expected given its rather less than traditional genesis.
It was financed largely by a new and curious crowd-funding platform called World of Mass Development (WMD), the brainchild of the game’s British developer, Slightly Mad Studios (Need for Speed: Shift, Shift 2: Unleashed).
WMD is clearly designed to attract people keen to have a say in the sort of game on which they’re spending their money. It allows backers to be more like investors, providing design input and potentially even earning some of the money they contributed back via a profit sharing system. They have a legitimate stake in the project.
The first product of this lengthy funding and development process is Project CARS, a vast and visually magnificent racing game well worth the attention of hardcore car aficionados, though it does have a few wrinkles that may make it a difficult pill for folks who straddle the line between enthusiast and casual racing fan.
Slightly Mad StudiosBefore getting to the nitty-gritty, I need to divulge that while I play loads of racing games, I’m not exactly a gearhead.
And Project CARS is definitely made with gearheads in mind.
It’s a decidedly European-style simulation racer (though with an odd, ill-fitting American-accented woman providing voiceover explanations of various game systems) concerned much more with delivering an authentic racing experience than the sort of gimmickry that’s become the norm in many modern racers. There’s no ability to rewind to recover from crashes, no leveling or artificial progression systems. There’s just you, your car, and the race at hand.
In career mode, these races pop up on an annual calendar of events and come in the form of short series and one-offs in a variety of classes, from superkarts all the way up to true Formula rides. You can enter or skip any race your current contracts allow. Many are framed as true motorsport events, complete with practice, qualifying, and race sessions (sometimes with mandatory pit stops) spread out over a full racing weekend.
At the end of the season you’ll be offered new contracts. You can track your career performance and measure your progress toward a variety of milestones, including long-term historic goals – such as winning a triple crown over three years – and smaller objectives, such as earning endorsements and accolades.
Online play, meanwhile, allows players to completely customize each session, designing every aspect of a full race weekend from scratch. In perhaps the most overt indication that this is indeed a game intended for hardcore racing nuts, the default options when creating an online match include manual rather than automatic shifting, a gritty helmet view cam, and a good deal more laps than most casual racing fans are probably interested in when playing online.
Slightly Mad StudiosSlightly Mad’s passion for true motorsport shines through in just about every aspect of the experience.
The cars are wonderfully lifelike and bursting with detail inside and out, from the interior plastic mouldings of headlights to working real-time gauges in the cockpit. You can even see the individual stitches on your driver’s racing gloves.
The dozens of real-world tracks (plus a few fun fictional ones) are equally stunning. Familiar circuits like the Nürburgring and Laguna Seca burst to life in fresh ways, with active and detailed crowds and some truly impressive particulate effects as cars shed debris in crashes and spin up grit when their wheels leave the course.
And don’t even get me started on the weather effects. If you’re playing on a tricked out PC you’ll be treated to individual water droplets pattering windshields before being quickly swiped away by wipers, tail lights reflecting off small raceway puddles, and patches of thick, dynamic fog. Longer races may take you in and out of multiple storm systems; a few laps raced in a deluge, then a few more in sunlight slowly drying out the tarmac – even as a second wave of clouds close in for another downpour to close out the race.
However, the developers’ ambition to giving us an authentic racing experience seems to have occasionally left them blind to the interests of people who may not want to play the way they do.
For example, they clearly assume that players will want to view their game from inside the car for maximum immersion, and have provided multiple interior camera angles to do just that – including a lovely centre-console view just to the side of the driver’s head.
However, there’s only one behind-the-car camera, and it’s a little low and close to the butt end of your vehicle. Going over a steep hill often causes your car to get in the way of your view of the track ahead. I found myself trying to peer through the rear window and windshield to see what was coming up whenever this happened. A second exterior angle that pulls the camera back a few metres would have easily solved this problem.
Slightly Mad StudiosVehicle handling may also prove challenging for people who don’t want to play the way Slightly Mad intends.
The developers want you to be able to really feel what each of the game’s cars are like to drive, free of any synthetic interface aids. Superkarts, with their low mass, overpowered engines, and small but wide tires, are wildly grippy and corner like crazy. Weightier cars, meanwhile, are insanely easy to spinout, and correcting fishtails without completely easing off the accelerator can be maddeningly difficult.
A huge array of tuning options – downforce, springs, slips, weighting, brake balance, tire pressure…the list goes on – and a bevy of pit strategy options to do with fuelling, tire compounds and pressures, and damage repair help to further immerse car fanatics in the fantasy that they are actually driving and tinkering with the rides of their dreams. They’ll be in heaven.
Then there are guys like me, who just want to enjoy a quick roll around a gorgeous track in an envious vehicle and, you know, maybe win some races.
To that end, we’ve been given a healthy array of driving assists to fiddle with. Problem is, it takes a lot of fiddling to get things just right. And even then you may run into a few technical problems.
I typically play racing sims with assists like stability control and anti-lock braking switched on and opposing driver AI set somewhere above rookie but below professional. It quickly became apparent that I wasn’t going to have much success in Project CARS using these settings. At least not all the time.
The smallest mistakes – like dipping a couple of tires just off the track – were often enough to send me spinning out of control. That can make races on especially narrow circuits like Road America and Oulton Park, where there are long stretches of track that can barely fit two cars abreast, incredibly tricky.
Slightly Mad StudiosThis led me to switch on assisted steering – which helped, but not as much I’d have thought. Plus, assisted steering suffers a curious bug on some circuits that sees your car attempting to turn into the pit at the very start of the race, forcing the player to wrestle back control.
(And that’s just one of a number of technical problems I ran into during my 200 or so races, another of which was an occasional tendency for the game to think my car had left the track – invalidating my lap time – when my vehicle was clearly in the centre of the road.)
Plus, the (optional) cornering line that players like me rely on to know when to brake and how best to approach tricky bends doesn’t seem to be optimized by class. I found it often transitioned from green to red too early when in less powerful cars, prompting me to decelerate early and lose critical time, which kind of defeats its purpose.
Of course, Project CARS‘ target audience probably prefers not to rely on such assists – which could be why Slightly Mad didn’t lavish them with attention. That just tells me that this could be an instance in which the influence of a traditional publisher interested in delivering a product for a broader audience might have had a positive influence, pushing for such systems to be better tuned and polished.
Keeping all of this in mind, I was eventually able to settle on a selection of driving aids that felt comfortable and gave me a fighting chance at winning most races against average AI opponents. It just took a while. And there are still some races that I find myself avoiding on the calendar simply because I know I’ll likely be frustrated.
Slightly Mad StudiosIf you tend to look to racers simply for quick bits of disposal high-speed thrills and lean more toward the Hot Pursuits and Burnouts of the world than the Gran Turismos and Forza Motorsports, Project CARS could end up leaving you gripping your controller with white knuckles of aggravation.
That said, Simply Mad’s latest earns a pretty easy recommendation for anyone looking for a racing game unambiguously and unapologetically locked in the simulation category. Its vision is clear, and there can be little doubt that much love and passion was poured into its crafting.
Project CARS occupies a niche, but does so with confidence and aplomb. Wouldn’t it be nice if more developers were similarly self-assured?
Slightly Mad Studios