Project CARS

In the career mode, you can choose which stage to start with - the lowest rank being Go Karts. Once you start winning races, you will get invited to invitationals, each are in various types of cars so you get a variety rather than being stuck in the same car. If you win the main event, then you will be invited to the next rank for the following season.

There’s no money to earn, so you never purchase cars or upgrade them. You are given a car for each event. The overall vehicle selection is lower than other racing games, but there is enough variety.

Each event has different rules, so for example, the Go Karts have 2 races. The first race begins with the usual starting grid, whereas the second is a rolling start. Each event can have Practice, Qualifying, then the race proper. You get points for your finish, plus the fastest time during qualifying and the race will award bonus points. If you go off the track or cut a corner, your lap time is disqualified, so it is possible to finish first but not take the bonus points.

You can skip the practice and qualifying, but then you are placed at the bottom of the grid, so you are at a disadvantage. If you don’t mind cheating a bit to save time, you can disable the penalties, and set off before you see the green lights, so you can just cheekily drive yourself to the front of the grid.

Like most modern racing games, you can fine tune difficulty such as AI difficulty, ABS, Traction control, Stability control, racing line, and more. There are no rewinds, but you can enable the ability to restart the race.

Often the opponents don’t take into account your position and will ram you off the road. This is really bad in a game without rewinds. I often thought the AI were going by different rules; when you did see them crash, they seemed to recover quickly, and seemed to be able to travel across grass without much problem. Yet if I drive on the grass, my speed is severely reduced, and it is very easy to spin out. I saw the same kind of effect when it suddenly started raining (there’s dynamic weather); I would lose grip and begin to skid everytime I turned, yet the AI looked like they were unaffected. I ploughed into a driver and saw him suddenly go into reverse full-speed in order to turn around - there was no slowly coming to a stop first, just an instant direction switch.

There’s some really bizarre collisions. If you scrape into the barriers, sometimes you instantly go from 100mph to 0. If you crash into a Kart, you often start mounting them and end up resting against your opponent’s back, which looks ridiculous.

I was surprised about how janky this game is at times, given that people really hyped it up as this amazing, realistic racing simulator. I encountered a couple of hard crashes (actually rebooted my computer), and it didn’t get off to a good start when it crashed when I turned the first corner in my very first race. On a few occasions my controller stopped working for a few seconds, causing me to crash into the barriers. On two occasions, the lap count stopped working so I couldn’t finish the race.

When you finish the race, the default menu item seems random. Sometimes the default was “Exit” which doesn’t save the current race result so a few times I quit when I had won - which is absolutely infuriating. When you return to your career screen, sometimes it likes to default to “Abandon Career”. It’s like it really doesn’t want you to play the game.