Review — Project CARS 3
Slightly Mad Studios reimagines the Project CARS series and brings us a new driver journey in Project CARS 3.
It has been three years since the release of Project CARS 2, but the release of it’s follower came somewhat as a surprise as it was long quiet surrounding the title after it’s developer Slighty Mad Studios was bought by Codemasters. The quick release after it’s official announcement did result in getting our hands on the game faster than expected and find out what the game is all about.
Back to the roots
Slightly Mad Studios made its debut with Need for Speed: Shift, a racing title that tried to bring a more realistic experience into the Need for Speed franchise. In 2011, they went for a revolutionary undertaking. They launched a crowdfunding campaign to create a community assisted racing simulator (hence the acronym CARS). A sequel quickly followed and after the success of Project CARS 2, the development on the third entry quickly started. But the studio decided to press the recent button, as CEO of Slightly Mad Studios Ian Bell claimed that the game would be a spiritual successor to the Need for Speed: Shift series.
When going into this game, this is an important statement to take not of. Previous Project CARS focused on being a racing simulator, so people buying Project CARS 3 with the same mindset might be very disappointed with the new direction the developers have taken. The car handling in this game is closer to that in games like Grid, Driveclub or Forza Horizon 4. This genre is also known as simcade: not an arcade racer but not really a simulator either. It’s a genre that is rather popular nowadays and I also enjoy it as it offers a fun experience without stressing you out too much. The car handling was fine for me, but it leaves fans of the previous games’ handling out in the cold. Even on the Professional setting, with all racing aids turned off, the handling was too easy and too arcadey. And these players will also mourn the loss of things like tire temperature, fuel usage, the race weekend structure and the ability to incorporate pitstops in your races. The advantage though is that the game plays much better with a controller than Project CARS 2 did!
Grind your way to the top
With this new approach, Project CARS tries to find a spot in a field that is already packed with good games. The way the game tries to create its won identity is trough a unique leveling system that is tied to challenges you must compete and is the main source of your income. Completing challenges such as mastering track, perform clean overtakes, use a certain type of car x times etc. will let you gain experience and each level has milestones which reward you money for completing them. This money you will use for buying cars and upgrading them. Important is to know that you can also upgrade cars to higher performance classes and even convert them to race cars.
You can gain experience in every mode, even online, and you’ll quickly find out that you’ll need more money than you can earn. This means you will have to grind quite a bit to earn those much-needed dollars. When looking at the career mode, you might quickly run into financial problems, especially if you don’t carefully plan your progress. My advice would be to not try to complete every event in order and look at which cars you need for events in a certain series. If there’s an event that requires you to have a Porsche and another series has three events with German cars, you’d best buy a Porsche car when you start this series instead of that fancy Ford GT for example. This of course mean that restricts you in which cars you are forced to buy. And sometimes its better to skip or buy an event than to spend hundreds of dollars on a car you’re gonna use for one single event. Trust me, I’ve made the mistake where I bought a car for a single race early on in the game which gave me money issues which forced me to grind outside the career mode and even sell my other cars in order to being able to advance.
The career mode certainly has plenty of content on offer, with various series in different categories and several special races and championships grouped in the Invitational and Challenge series. While there’s not as much variety on display as in the previous game, you’ll still be able to compete in truck racing, indy 500, “Formula 1” racing, Le Mans racing and so on. It did feel like the difficulty is rather unbalanced and especially time trial events feel way to hard. The whole idea of having to collect stars and each race having three stars with various objectives that aren’t necessarily tied to winning the race also seems a bit too much like it was copy-pasted from Driveclub.
Rivals
As a racing game, Project CARS 3 has a decent selection of cars and tracks for you to enjoy. The tracks include real life circuits as well as some fictional tracks. There’s also plenty of modes available in the game. Aside from the campaign, you find the usual singleplayer modes and multiplayer functionalities. Going online, you have the choice between regular lobbied quick races, the Rivals mode and timed events, which offer races with qualifying sessions at various intervals during the day. Rivals was the most interesting mode. This mode offers the chance to compete for leaderboard positions as you try to prove to be the fastest racer during a season of 4 weeks. You race against ghosts of other players in daily, weekly and monthly races. It at least seemed that people were playing this mode, because the few timed events I joined I was either alone or with 1 other player who quitted very fast and I never found a game lobby for a quick race. So the multiuplayer already felt pretty dead to me a few weeks after the release.
The biggest issue I had with the game, were the graphics however. I can’t tell how it looks on PC, PlayStation 4 or the Xbox One X, but on the original Xbox One the graphics are a big disappointment. This doesn’t look like a game that was released this summer. At times, it feels like I can count the pixels, as if there’s no anti-aliasing. There’s a lot of screen tearing in turns and frame drops when there’s a lot of cars on the screen. The graphics often feel flat, as if someone forgot to turn on certain settings and it feels like textures didn’t load completely. Heck, I turned on Forza Motorsport 7 after a session once and that game looked infinitely better. Even Project Cars 2 looked better when I booted it up again, with better lighting effects and more detail on the tracks. Yet I’ve seen video where the game looks better than what I’ve experienced, making me believe the game runs rather poorly on the Xbox One.
Maybe the game might not have received the attention it needed as the studio was also working on Fast & Furious Crossroads at the same time. But certainly feels like it could have used some more development time to truly shine. As it stands now, Project CARS 3 is an adequate racing game that has some flaws, yet shows a lot of promise. Maybe we’ll get an enhanced version on the next gen consoles, showing is the true nature of this beast. You just have to accept the new direction this game has taken and accept the fact that this isn’t a pure racing simulator.
3/5
Reviewed on Xbox One.
Download code provided by the publisher.
