Okay, so I bought the game. It’s a lot of fun.
Unfortunately it seems that when they worked to improve the PC version, they only did the graphics - the interface and multiplayer is very clearly designed for consoles and could use massive improvement. The RV/home base hub system works well enough, but the time to get to races and between races takes too long. Consoles use animated load screens to keep you occupied while they slowly load stuff from dvd… but the animations are timed to last as long as it would take an xbox to load that information. PCs do this way faster (and mine in particular since I have a raptor drive) - so my computer is done loading data about halfway through the animation (where they show you moving on the world map, achievements, etc), and the rest of the time I just have to sit there and wait for the animations to complete. So they’re meant for something to distract you during a long load time and turned into something that artificially creates a long load time.
The multiplayer is a mixed bag. I only have a few hours of experience with it. When it works well, it’s very very fun. But it’s very clearly a console multiplayer experience. The main way to play lets you choose from three major categories of racing - non-contact (rally/trailblaizer), contact (raid, land rush, rally cross) and… other modes (domination, last man standing). But from there you just get dropped seemingly randomly into a lobby with other people, with a random map/game mode picked. The only control the people in the lobby have over what to play is that they get to veto one random map/game mode by vote… at which point they are assigned another random mode which they have no control over. This is possibly the dumbest system I have ever seen and very annoying.
There’s no control over the other options either - if you like damage to affect performance and not just look pretty - no go in the default mode. Want to force people to use certain camera modes or manual transmission? Nope. It’s all the same options. This is, as far as I can tell, the main way to play the game, so that’s pretty dissapointing.
You don’t get a choice on which lobby to join either - and it won’t even tell you what your ping is to the server. Not even one of those “you’re too dumb to understand milliseconds, so here are 3 bars of performance” types of connectivity meters that they use in other parts of the game.
On the other hand, they do allow the creation of custom races which alleviates these problems. From there you can set track rotation, car types, options like forced camera, manual, full damage system, which grade of cars are used, etc. But they don’t allow you to name or describe your custom game in any way - it’s just whatever your games for windows live tag is, which is dumb. It can take a while for games to fill up this way, so it’s best if you have a few friends together to get the game going.
The actual in-game multiplayer racing experience is excellent if it happens to pick a good host. The net code can be seamless and it’s very exciting turning the corner around that final bend when you know someone is right on your tail. With a lesser host… it’s not terrible, but you get some warping, and some points where the cars go semi-transparent and become unhittable… I think this may represent times when their position is not up to date with the rest of the clients and it doesn’t want to create phantom collisions.
The non-rally/trailblazer modes, where there’s contact, features a lot of it. People race very violently. The rally and trailblazer modes feature other cars as ghosts with no collisions - you’re strictly racing against the clock competitively.
The game is beautiful. I’m only running the DX9 version, and I’ve heard the DX11 version is significantly better, but it’s still the best looking racing game I’ve played. The texture detail and sometimes background detail could use a little work (especially poly counts), but the lighting and particle systems are the best I’ve seen. It really feels like you’re kicking up mud everywhere and it looks great. It’s the only game where I actually watch most of the race replays because it’s so nice to look at.
I can’t say how much variety there is yet because I’ve only played a fraction of the way through. There are only 9 basic areas with a few tracks each, so I’d prefer some more variety, but what tracks are in there are pretty well designed.
I can’t comment on the accuracy of the driving model or anything like that, because I’m not a big racing car guy so I don’t have much of a reference to compare it to. Based on perusing some reviews, it’s definitely less technical/realistic than sim-style racing games, but more accurate than arcadey stuff like most of the need for speed games. Most people like the balance.
So there’s some negative stuff in there, but I’m having a lot of fun playing this game. I would recommend it. Best racing game I’ve ever played - although part of it is because I think rally racing is a lot more fun than racing on roads.
Edit: Oh, and I (and a friend) had a problem with the game, both the demo and full game, crashing when you started it. It relates somehow to the graphics settings, I think. To fix this problem, run the game with the command line switch -gamemode and then go in and change the options to suit your preferences. Then restart it, and the game will continue to work from then on.
