It’s a term motorsports fans, and racing fans in general, are all too familiar with, jumping the start or a false start, when you’re too eager to get out of the gate and you go before it’s time. Project Motor Racing feels like a jump start in so many ways, however, unlike most jumpstarts that are met with heavy penalties, I do feel there may be potential there still to come.
I have to outline this by saying I am not the fastest driver around, I’m not going to set any leaderboards on fire and I am certainly not one to max out the difficulty. I take a sunday driver approach to racing games, I use assists and most of the time, I’m driving with a controller. I travel a lot so even my measly logitech G29 and rig, gets covered up for most of my drives.
I say this to preface the fact that I won’t know the smallest of details and my expertise are akin to a regular casual player, jumping in the game after a days work rather than one that will spend countless hours perfecting their laps and setups.
But there are sadly too many issues with Project Motor Racing that I can’t recommend it at the moment to even the casual fans, not at this price point.
Force Feedback: The Force feedback is non-existent, to the point I thought my controller was faulty. The game detected my controller but throughout several game modes and races on various cars, the FFB felt non-existent. It felt the same to be on the grass and the tarmac and as you can imagine, that makes it sadly unplayable.
Assists need another look: It’s not built for new players. The assists help but sadly, they are very much a ‘on or off’ case, this means that even with Traction Control, ABS, etc assists being ‘ON’, it still felt extremely challenging to straighten out the car after a slow corner (mind you, I’m on controller), and with Hypercars this meant that ABS felt non-existent. If you’re a new player, be ready to spend a LOT of time practicing before you are able to be consistent, let alone competitive.
The AI: There seems to be a solid case of ‘if you’re in my line, I will bump you out’ when it comes to AI and how they race you.
The Pricing: This is a game that definitely needed the Early Access treatment, I know it’s not the greatest experience for gamers but sadly for this price point, along with Day 1 DLC, it’s a tough ask to recommend this to your friends (or the few people that may end up reading this). They have said “This launch is just the starting grid for our ambitions…”, so I do hope the team addresses the concerns.
It’s not all bad though because there are some bright spots, especially when it comes to things like the cars, which has an exhaustive list of dream drives waiting for you (sadly some are behind Day 1 DLC), but still to see the variety of cars on offer is great, fully licensed as well!
Tracks aren’t lagging either with 27 Tracks, all of them scanned, which is always nice, this means that the single-player modes like Career mode feel great, FFB and AI issues not withstanding.
Verdict
If Project Motor Racing came out in Early Access, 90% of the issues would have been justified, it would have been bugs that needed fixing and optimization improvements that could have come down the line. A full launch at the price of $59.99 for the base game, is a tough sell.
I do hope the team re-focuses and fixes the biggest issues (compatibility, FFB and AI), but as things stand, it’s hard to recommend.
2.0 out of 5.0 stars
Project Motor Racing is available on Steam.
UPDATE: Developers did release a day 1 patch that addressed some of the concerns, for full patch notes and their message to the community – https://projectmotorracing.com/newsArticle.php?articleCode=YjU4NjVlOTQy
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