I haven't played racing games in a long while. I have always wanted to get into them, but I always faced the problem that they were either too arcade, either leaned too much on heavy simulation, which is intimidating for me. Forza games look fun, but I don't have an Xbox, so I picked this up because it seemed to find the middle ground I was looking for. The game is often described as the spiritual successor to the FlatOut series - which, again, I don't remember playing for any good amount of time.
I have played the PS5 version, which has been released in 2021. I love the haptic PS5 controller, and I was amazed at how well you can feel the surface of the road in your hands. I can't really put it into words, but it's incredibly immersive when you can actually connect with your car as it drifts, feeling the sensation in your hand. Mud and asphalt also feel different in your hand. Maybe that's something you need to experience for yourself, but the haptic feedback in this game is amazing. As for the game itself, back when it launched, a notable feature of the game engine was/is the use of soft-body damage modelling, which enables location-based damage that affects the driving dynamics of vehicles in a realistic fashion. Before a race, you can select the way you want to scale the damage, ranging from normal to extreme. The game is definitely made to be played with the normal setting, in my experience. I tried to play with realistic damage and very often the AI would just not be able to finish the race, the last lap being this apocalyptic run where you'd se the wreckages of your opponents. During some races I have even encountered blockades of the wreckages:
Where do we go now?
However, I had a lot of fun with it. It's the kind of fun you have when you try to mess with the game's system and driving through the apocalypse, trying to preserve your own care is undeniably interesting and fun.
The tracks are also diverse, some featuring more traditional racing courses, while also go out of the way to make loops that set you up big time for a crash. Overall, I'd say there's a pretty good selection of tracks. I keep reading how there's a good selection of vehicles, but I just kept upgrading and using the same one until it was no longer competitive enough. I know racing is about the engineering as much as it is about the car, but I just wasn't fascinated enough by them here. Maybe a better vehicle presentation would've worked better for me. As it is, buying a new car was expensive and initially much worse than what I previously had. I managed to get through half the game using only two cars. Moreover, I would've liked to be able to customize the vehicle more, add my own combination of stickers and place them on the car. As it is, you can choose from a few pre-made types of design and then switch up the colours.
While the races themselves were, for the most part, fun, I would've enjoyed a more robust career mode. You get to choose a league and then compete in random events until you get enough points to unlock another league. Eventually, I got tired with it. I didn't need much, but I would've liked some central theme to tie it all together. Maybe let me customize my driver or do a simple points system against the AI.
In multiplayer, I would usually end up somewhere in the middle. Multiplayer is fine and people are still actively playing it, but again, I eventually got bored without a connecting thread. Once boredom set in, it didn't really motivate to keep playing the game.
In my personal experience, I initially had a lot of fun with it, after which my interest gradually declined due to lack of a mechanic to tie it all together. As I mentioned earlier, I wasn't all that crazy about buying new cars, so simply trying to unlock everything didn't really do it for me. Overall, though, a fun racing game which I do recommend to anyone with a passing interest in racing games.
