Do Forza and Gran Turismo finally have competition? Rory Buckeridge plays the hardcore driving sim

Words: Rory Buckeridge

What's this, then?

With a curious, "crowd sourced" development process and more delays than Crossrail, Project CARS (yes, that is an acronym, a bit tragically, for Community Assisted Racing Simulator) had all the hallmarks of arriving as a total lemon of a racing game.

It comes as a pleasant surprise, then, that this slavishly hardcore driving sim is something of a triumph.

Does it have many cars and tracks?

It does: over 65 vehicles with marques including Mercedes, McLaren, BMW, Audi, Aston, Ford, Pagani and faux Porsche: Ruf. There's a fine selection running from literal go karts to touring cars to proper track monsters, but don't expect Forza or Gran Turismo exhaustiveness.

You'll be careening into tyre walls and barriers across 110 tracks on 30 locations, with each track offering a selection of differing layouts (to bump the numbers, it often feels). Highlights include Spa Francorchamps, Laguna Seca, Donnington, a California Highway point to point, Monza and Silverstone.

And the Nurburgring is there. Obviously. Because racing game. Make no mistake, though, this is a proper hardcore track racing sim through and through.

How does it start?

First, you'll have to make a driver - we christened ours Mike Driver, because we're creative like that - to take on the journey of 'Career' mode.

But if you haven't the time or inclination, there are quick play options including: Solo - a quick race weekend, any car or track; Online - up to 16 player online multiplayer; Free Practice - just laps, any car, any track; Quick random - roll the dice, drive car; Time Trial - online bragging rights for lap times; and Driver Network - regular community challenges which will open up once the game's on sale.

To give a sense of immersion, Mike gets regular emails from his team congratulating him on qualification skills, contract offers from other teams and, weirdest, a strange Twitter-feed of fawning @s saying, well, the kind of obsequious and pointless things people tweet.

So, this career-thing...

Yes. We struck upon the "Tier 3" option of GT3 because, well, it seems as good a starting point as any. You can start where you like and with pretty much any car: there's no punishment Micra here.

You are then offered a choice of three contracts from competing racing teams, with the team choice dictating your car. We opted for Gridstorm Racing's compelling offer of their "very competitive" Mercedes-Benz SLS AMG GT3 but also because team owner "Geoff Cannada" was so polite and has such a terrific, made up surname.

As you race through divisions your mad cornering skills will be noticed, and you'll receive emails from other teams in other tiers and championships, offering cars for contracts, but that throws up a weird dynamic that in career mode it's impossible to run two championships concurrently.

You can't cherry pick and dip in and out of, say, go karting and GT3: you have to finish one set of challenges first, then quit, essentially, to try another. This is rum.

How does the racing work?

Choose your career division and you'll be thrown into full, weekend race meets, consisting of an authentic (long) itinerary of two practice sessions, two qualifying sessions and two races, the second longer and requiring a mandatory pit stop and tyre change.

But you can essentially dip in and out of these as you please, so you can skip practice sessions entirely, or run through them in "simulation" mode. And similarly, you can lay down a couple of hot, qualifying laps before tapping out.

Although, be warned: we laid down a stonking, Hamilton-esque wet lap of Road America to apparently bag pole, only to find that the track had clearly dried out a lap or two later and our hot lap was suddenly 40 seconds tardy and we were shunted to the back of the grid.

But hell, we knew the risks. This is where you'll first notice that you get punished for leaving the track, but more of that later.

Before races you can spend as long as you want setting your car up, and there's even a handy tyre saving option, so if the heavens open in a British Bank Holiday way, you can nip into the pits and just thumb a pre-saved wet tyres option.

How's the handling?

This is Project CARS big, big win and almost certainly a result of the game's unorthodox development cycle. Crowd funded by developer Slightly Mad Studios, backers were invited to get on track throughout the game's alpha and beta development stages to play, feed back and criticise, but most importantly lay down masses of telemetry for the coders to analyse.

And whether through this exhaustive crowd-sourced testing, smart development or serendipity, the handling is pretty much perfect. Our AMG felt a dream on Laguna Seca: stepping out under oversteer and understeering inevitably into gravel traps, but mostly going where you pointed it, to enormous satisfaction.

Take a Pagani Huayra out for a few, brisk laps on the same track, though, and it's immediately a different story -it's twitchy, bipolar and frankly a bit hairy. As it should be.

And the "enemy" AI is exemplary. Turned down low, you'll win every race by a minute or so, but dial it up and your opponents won't relinquish a tyre's-breadth to you, resulting in some viciously enjoyable races. Again, it's up to you.

A nice PS4 detail is your pit crew notifications are played through the controller's wee speaker. Great for immersion, plus it scares the absolute skin off any cats which happen to be sat on your lap while reviewing. Terrific.

Does it look pretty?

Based on Slightly Mad's "Madness" engine used in their Need For Speed Shift games, CAR is a game of intense prettiness. Add dynamic and spectacular weather - rain drops splash artily onto the screen, fog rolls eerily in - and OCD levels of memory: trash a cone and it'll sit forlornly - not angry, just disappointed - on the track for the rest of the race.

Laguna Seca, meanwhile, quietly and noticeably fills up with sand, lap after lap as tyres paint it inexorably onto the tarmac.

Can I fiddle with set-up?

You can noodle more than a New Orleans jazz saxophonist. Pretty much everything you want can be inched a smidge in any direction, but you'll be looking most at driver aids - best line and braking notification, automatic gear shift, steering and braking assistance, driving assists, anti-lock brakes, stability control and traction control.

For the hardcore and masochistic, all this can be turned off. And then there's gameplay stuff like damage, mechanical failures, tyre wear, fuel usage and flags and penalties.

In your garage, you can tweak tyre compounds and the pressure of individual tyres, brake pressure, brake balance and traction control slip. Then tuning set-ups can be saved to individual locations to best suit the track. If you suffer debilitating OCD, this is the place for you.

Any issues?

Firstly, we must address the arbitrary and vexing off-track punishments. Go roaming off the asphalt and you'll be penalised first by not registering a time for your current lap, then for the next one too.

This would be fine if it were consistent, but it often feels like sometimes you can do a couple of doughnuts on the run off area and the game will give you a cheeky wink and a sly thumbs up, then lay an Amish inch of rubber on the following corner and you'll be banned for two laps.

Secondly, and most strangely, is that when you're locked into a career championship it's literally impossible to park your progress and shuffle back through the menus to browse another division.

Chosen GT3? You're in for the long haul, buddy. An unfathomable quirk that's egregious and perplexing in equal measure.

This does, of course, mean that there's none of the RPG-like progression of your Forzas and Gran Turismos - the established rhythm of race cars, win races, earn money, buy better cars which some gamers applaud, some find tedious. It's Slightly Mad's decision to make, but levelling up is a stranger to this game.

There's also the general whiff of feature creep and out-the-door-ism. It's just missing that final product polish - which marks Forza out, for instance - to be as engaging and compelling a mix.

Storm through the pits and all the garages are curiously and jarringly empty, which jolts your immersion. And they clearly ran out of money on the pit stop animations. You just get the jack bloke eyeballing you through your windscreen and the sound effects of nuts being dropped and mechanics swearing.

This should be a hugely exciting/frustrating part of the race, but instead, it feels like you may as well be picking fluff out of your belly button. To include a driver Twitter feed and not this, smacks of some questionable calls in the development process.

Also, trading paint with your fellow drivers feels a bit, well, lame. Contact feels pingy and insubstantial, when it should feel meaty and spine rattling. DriveClub, for instance, got a lot wrong, but its car contact you felt right through the tub and into your soul. All these things point to a game that isn't quite ready.

Should I buy it?

For its faults, there's something hugely engaging about Project CARS. It's nailed the basics with a claw hammer and not sweated the smaller stuff. The car choice, track selection and championship options are all long-game choices.

But it's the immersion that's the acid test. Hearing the grumble of rubber as your tyres reach the edge of traction, feeling the rumble as you nick the apex while ruthlessly hunting down the car in front, you just know that you're firmly in the driving zen zone and that Slightly Mad Games have just got this right.

We therefore dub this one of the new franchises of this generation and by a country mile the best racing game of the year so far. (Hell, it's the only racing game of note of the year so far.)

Even so, Forza and Gran Turismo finally have genuine competition on the racing podium.

Project CARS is out on May 7 on PC, PS4 and Xbox One. We tested the PS4 version.