You only get to make one first impression. If Project Motor Racing sounds familiar, it’s because it’s from former Slightly Mad alumni. They’re now stationed at Straight 4 Studio and have only had one thing in mind. Whilst Project Cars was a more fully-featured racing sim, this spiritual successor is lacking in options and, crucially, technical aptitude. Whilst I enjoy how it handles on a controller, it’s a tough thing to recommend in current trim.
So what’s in Project Motor Racing? Well, the modes are thin on the ground. The single player offering has a race weekend or a career mode to dive into. At present, there is no time trial or standalone practice mode. If you want to do some hotlaps, it’ll have to be done within a race weekend. The weekends are flexible. You can tweak almost everything from opposition strength to session lengths. Weather can be modified and you can set track conditions from an ideal hot and rubbered surface to a completely green track.
The career mode is surprisingly basic. As an owner-driver, you purchase your own cars with your race winnings. There is no management to it but you can pick one of three sponsorship models to impact how your funding can be acquired. You can also set your starting budget which does allow players to skip the formalities of the lower formulas and jump right into the Hypercars. Unfortunately, you can adjust settings once a career is underway. You do have three available slots so you can consign any experimentation to those.
Car selection is pretty diverse. Whilst it’s not in the hundreds, there’s some gems in here. I don’t think I’ve driven a Lister Storm for well over a decade and the Morgan GT1 is a phenomenally weird looking car. There’s some crowd favourites with the Mazda 787B sounding predictably demonic. Each class does have a distinctive feel with power being the big differentiator. I will say, the Hypercars feel like they have a narrower turning circle. They seem reluctant to be tipped into a corner.
Being limited to the time on the tarmac is disappointing. Whilst the team management aspect of other sims can feel like busywork, it really makes Project Motor Racing feel dated and unsophisticated. That said, having to pay your own repair bill does encourage clean racing. It’s undercut by being able to quit and restart any available session. Errors can always be rubbed out, at the expense of your own time.
Speaking of errors, the penalty system has had an overhaul since launch. Whilst going wide or exceeding track limits, can land you a two second punishment, you’re typically given a prior warning or told to reduce your speed temporarily. I think it works fine. I’m no longer punished for any excursion and it now does seem to consider any meaningful gains.
How it handles is quite strange. I’ve become used to racing games have a defined, comfortable feel on controller. Project Motor Racing gives me no such security. The slower cars feel relatively planted and there’s a sense I could push my luck with them. The force feedback isn’t always firing but I do get some audio acknowledgement of a tyre slipping. Once I got to GT level and above, things become a lot more twitchy. I was having to relearn how to drive.
I’ve had some enjoyment from it. I can be engrossed by driving something that will bite back. I’ve had to really respect the throttle, tall curbs and quick changes of direction. It can be real snappy but it’s not something I couldn’t adapt to. The downside to this is that my pace is awful. The lack of confidence leads to me being slower and, generally tetchy when it comes time to up the ante. Acceleration can feel laboured, at least from a car’s default settings and it can make the vehicle’s power feel restrained.
Inversely, the throttle can lead to the more powerful cars being twitchy. In the Hypercars, that speed doesn’t translate to a lot of downforce. That can make these premium models a real handful to drive and I don’t feel a connection to the ground like I do in slower machinery. Battling AI can complicate matters. There is a bedding in period for cold tyres which does make a noticeable difference. The opposition do spot you coming but I’ve found their pace to vary wildly between different tracks. It’s a strange thing to observe. The opposition themselves are aware of you but they do tend to make a hash of the first corner. On the one hand, it’s nice to see them run wide and make mistakes but it’s still not as clever as I’d want it to be. They can be focused on fighting each other at your expense and pack racing is still a little dicey.
Multiplayer and weekly challenges are available but the sheer time it takes to populate leaderboards is excruciating. It seems to check the servers constantly, making the menus feel sluggish. At least those rankings do show the cars at their quickest. There is pace to find and my hope is the physics and handling can be mastered. Competing online requires you to complete a single race against AI as a graduation test. I’m not sure that will have the desired effect of weeding out the Pastor Maldonados on the grid.
Visually, it looks behind the times. On track, there’s pop-in and some muddy textures. When following traffic, some have a box outlining them which is very distracting. I’ve seen worse but, for a personnel that’s produced more polished work, it’s a shame to see those rough edges. I did find he way marbles are kicked up to be a nice touch. It’s worth noting the performance is not quite smooth. It’s manageable but whatever frame rate they’re targetting is not being hit. Audio fares a lot better. I love how the cars sound in this. You hear the brakes being applied, tyres sliding across the surface of the road and the shifting of the car through corners. Whilst I don’t know the accuracy of some of the engine notes, they are loud and impactful.
I worry just how much post-game support Project Motor Racing will receive. It’s clear the release came in hot and underbaked. I enjoy the core driving but it’s at the expense of truly feeling confident on a controller. The first patch at least addresses issues with the AI but it seems to have unintentionally created frequent crashes. Asking full price for this is a very tall ask. There isn’t enough content or pinnace to justify that. Here’s hoping there’s additions down the pipeline but I can’t recommend it in it’s current form. Rather than a continuation of the Project Cars series, it feels like a reboot.
+ Solid car selection.
+ Well-rounded selection of tracks.
+ Single race weekends are full of options.
- AI is still not quite fully formed.
- Looks dated and lacks some visual polish.
- At the time of writing, crashes have been frequent.