Project Motor Racing Review

In the lead-up to Project Motor Racing’s release, you couldn’t move in the sim racing space without hearing about how it was going to reinvigorate the genre and bring something truly new to players. With its narrowed focus on a select few cars from motorsport’s “golden age”, and promising a career mode that was more than just a to-do list of races — was it too good to be true?

Coming from Straight4 Studios, a team headed up by industry veteran Ian Bell and developers who have some well-received titles under their respective belts, all of the stars would appear to have aligned for the development of a new racing game. After the disappointment of Project CARS 3 not being a sequel to Project CARS 2, but rather some arcade-inspired title that to this day I maintain should’ve had the name Project CARS: SHIFT. Since it shared more with the development team’s history with Need for Speed: Shift than it did with Project CARS, Straight4 already had a mighty hill to climb to prove that they weren’t just going to bait-and-switch another arcade racer in its place when it dropped.

And, for a couple of hours of playtime, it was indeed fun. I kept to the cheaper cars and started the lowest tier of career mode, opting to start as a journeyman driver with the authentic setting to try and clamber onto that feeling of progression that a driver with a limited budget might be something of an Achilles heel to a motorsport “team”. A few events in, however, and I noted that the career mode had almost whittled itself down to the dreaded to-do list of events, with a small smattering of team management welded onto the side of it, mostly as a way to force you to spend some of your hard-earned winnings. Don’t get me wrong, it’s one of the more varied attempts at a career mode we've seen recently... but it didn’t exactly have me coming back for more.

To cleanse the palate, I decided to take some of the faster cars out for a spin (which is more literal than you’d think); this is where I really felt the arbitrary limitations of Project Motor Racing creeping in. Whilst I could get the car round a lap fine, they offered little to no feedback through the wheel, whether turning in hard, or skipping over kerbs. Though I appreciate that it’s been noted by real-world motorsports drivers that there’s not the same level of feel through the wheel as you’d normally get in a sim, that’s because in a simulated environment you’re missing out on other key details such as the “seat of your pants” feeling that force feedback is meant to convey to the driver so they may understand what the car is doing at any given moment without those real-world forces being applied.

With that, I felt dejected with Project Motor Racing. So much hype had been worked up around this game and had been shared with friends who were also looking forward to it, that it ended up feeling like this is a title that absolutely should have been launched into an early access program to gather feedback from the community before its 1.0 release. However, a double-edged sword that may have been, as I don’t think the general public would have been kinder to it either, even with the early access label.

Overall, though, there could be something here that might end up being a bit special. It all depends on how much faith Straight4 has in developing the title further as it certainly did look good in action. It’s just a shame it didn’t have the feeling to go with it.