Project CARS Review

Disclaimer:

The following review is based upon the Xbox One version of the game. What's mentioned below isn't necessarily indicative of the PS4 or PC versions of the game. Update:

Slightly Mad Studios are aware of the issues mentioned and are working on fixes for them. Though they cannot give an ETA for the patches on Xbox One due to Microsoft's QA process. Note that this review is accurate as of the time of publishing.

It’s here. It’s finally here. Slightly Mad Studios’ beautiful racer Project CARS has finally hit its official release having been pushed back three separate times across more than six months. Having seen a preview build of the game at the Namco Bandai offices a few months back, I was more than a little excited to get my hands on what would now be a beautifully polished game and play it using my own steering wheel setup.

The preview event had the game running on PS4s for the majority and a PC on a large 4K screen, which looked awesome. Strangely, there was a complete absence of the Xbox One version for some reason. At the time, it didn't really strike me as being out of the ordinary, the event had PS4s and a PC set up, no big deal.

But having played (or at least attempted to) on the Xbox One version, I think I now know why.

Go back and look at the praise I was giving the game back in the preview. It was smooth. Silky. I’d ran a race with a full pack of cars and barely noticed any slowdown, but now, I barely got round the first few corners of the Azure Coast when I was hit by one of the issues that seems to be only plaguing the Xbox release, from what I can see.

The first issue I came across was the lack of distinct feedback from the steering wheel. I could feel the tyres skipping around the corners, but I had no feeling of when the car was on the edge, just before breaking traction. This made the cars feel very light and ‘floaty’, sadly removing any feeling of connection with the car.

Next was the frameskip/freezing. This one makes the game unplayable as it is right now. I was heading into a corner when the screen froze. The audio was still working, so I knew the game would come back to life. What I didn't know was when. We're talking 2-3 second freezes here and when it did return me to the action, I was roughly two foot away from a tyre wall, still travelling at 60ish MPH.

UPDATE: This is the stuttering I'm referencing. And I was getting this consistently

Since I want to play this as close to a sim title as possible, with full damage mechanics, this would end my race pretty quickly. If it was certain corners that it happened on, you could maybe prepare for it (not that this should be happening anyway) but because it’s seemingly at completely random times, all you can do is pray that it’s not going to happen during the race.

My first career race was in the go-karts. During the countdown to race start, my kart skipped forward a touch and caused me to false start the race. I hadn't pressed the accelerator up to this point, so I'm not sure where that burst came from.

Lastly, a lack of support for H-Shifters left me confused. At first, I thought I was mis-shifting, slamming the car into the wrong gear and totally missing reverse at one point. Again, did I mention this is supposed to be a sim racer? I’d have thought support for a H-Shifter would have been one of the things they added from the get-go. I've spent a while trawling through the options in case it was a setting I'd missed, to no avail. Especially since there’s support for using a clutch!

Until a point where Slightly Mad Studios release an update that squashes the above bugs making the game playable in some format, I’m putting the game back on the shelf and sticking with Forza Motorsport 5.