Developer: Slightly Mad Studios
Publisher: Bandai Namco Entertainment
Release Date: September 22, 2017
ESRB: Everyone / PEGI 3
MSRP: $59,99
Available Platforms: PS4, Xbox One, PC
Genre: Racing Simulation
When I popped in my disc of Project Cars 2, it took well over an hour to install on the PS4 Pro and I was greeted with a 10GB+ day-one patch. While it installs you can play one quickplay track with one car. The career and all other modes are locked until the lengthy install is finished. Plan in 1-2 hours for the install. It’s easily the longest install I have ever seen on the PS4.
Once that’s done you have access to all cars and all tracks right away. You needn’t unlock or buy them anywhere. In fact, there’s no money system in the game at all. Everything is unlocked automatically from the get-go.
There’s quickplay, career mode, a test track, time trials, and online multiplayer.
Quickplay lets you select one track and a car of your choice. You can set daytime, weather, season, laps, number of opponents and their difficulty. There are tons of settings you can adjust for every race. The same customization applies the career.
You have full control over the difficulty settings and opponent behavior in the career. Want the opponents to drive aggressively or should they drive safely? You can choose all of that and fine-tune their difficulty from 0%-100%. The amount of laps and events per championship can also be adjusted. I like that you have so much freedom over how you want to play the game. It makes it accessible for players of all skill levels.
The career is pretty much the same as Project Cars 1. You drive in a few different motorsport categories. From Formula Rookie to Rallycross and Endurance Races – there’s everything professional racing has to offer. Each championship consists of a few races. Depending on your position you are assigned a score (first place gets the most points). The scores from all races are added together to determine the winner. Even if you place 4th in one race but win all the others you will still easily win the championship.
Before every race you can adjust some tuning of your car. Usually, the preset works quite well. Unfortunately though, you can’t adjust a whole lot in the tuning settings and it’s quite convoluted. Some text explanations shed light on the different values but the text on-screen is super tiny and unreadable unless you stand right in front of the screen. I found the menus in general had unreadable small text and were poorly done. There’s also considerable lag in all menus, mostly when selecting a game mode from the main menu.
For beginners there’s a mechanic that asks you questions about what’s wrong with your car and tells you what values to adjust to fix it. This feature is a fantastic idea and I really liked it. Only downside is that the mechanic adjusts each value by only one point when talking to him. There’s no option to tell him by how much to adjust the settings, so you either have to talk to him a hundred times or figure out what value he adjusted and do it in the settings yourself. Also, sometimes he will just tell you to go to a different category and doesn’t say what values to adjust. This has you clicking through menus for longer than the actual race is going to take, not the best design choice.
After finalizing your tuning you can save the setup in a preset slot. This can be loaded up quickly before the next race. You can have tons of setups per car and save them under unique names.
To sum up the tuning; it’s streamlined but a bit confusing to people who don’t usually play racing games. The mechanic is a great idea but poorly executed and the text explanations for specific values unreadable. There should have been more tuning options and a quick way to test what the changes actually do.
Now to the racing: it’s more challenging than your average street racing game a.k.a. Need for Speed. The handling is harder to master. What I didn’t realize at first was that you can adjust driving assistance and authenticity in the game settings. For the first few hours I had so much trouble. One bend in the road and I’d be making 720° spins even with the most careful steering. On ice the game was unplayable for me. There was a formula rookie career event on ice. Just accelerating (without steering at all) would make me do 720° spins on the road. It was impossible to drive a perfect lap. That’s when I realized the game was set to authentic. I really don’t think this mode is authentic at all. If racing cars were to drive like this they’d crash and burn at every turn. It’s even worse with the DualShock controller. The developers were going for a realistic driving experience, so naturally they focused more on driving wheels. With a controller the handling is absolutely horrible and I can’t really recommend it. With a driving wheel you have more control but it’s still not easy.
Once I enabled all the driving assistance options the game became much more pleasant. Authentic provides a nice challenge but it’s not feasible with the DualShock controller under bad weather conditions. Only attempt authentic if you have a racing wheel.
Even with all assistance options enabled the controller handling is behaving very oddly sometimes. You accelerate and the car is driving donuts for no apparent reason. It’s not just me either. I was driving with a friend online and he had the same issues. Never have I seen such odd handling in a racing game. It’s a bit frustrating but you get the hang of it eventually. The trick is to steer only very little as the handling is super sensitive with certain cars.
Time Trials are good to put your skills to the test. They come with leaderboards and allow you to drive on the same track repeatedly with preset conditions to beat the best time on the leaderboard. You can select and tune a car of your own, or copy the setup of people on the leaderboard. Every split second counts. Climbing the leaderboards of each track is a fun activity for when you’re done with the career. It adds replay value and will force you to perfect your driving — a nice touch to keep things interesting in the long run. It’s my favorite mode of the game as it’s the most competitive.
The online multiplayer is so-so. In the races that I played, people were just crashing into each other and driving very aggressively. That’s not really the game’s fault, people are just silly online and don’t care for their safety reputation grade. With friends it can be more fun. You don’t get thrown in random matches either. Instead, you see a list of available matches and can decide which to join. Some are time-based, others are lap-based. The connection was working fine and I didn’t have any disconnects or online issues aside from one glitchy trophy.
Speaking of trophies, they are fairly straightforward. It’s a decent list for a racing simulator. The platinum is easy because online things can be boosted. It just takes a while to do everything. I encountered one glitched online trophy. You have to share your tuning setup with a friend. As it turns out, if you have more than 100 friends it may not recognize your friend and as a result doesn’t give you the trophy. What fixed it for me was deleting my friend, adding them back and rebooting the game. This seems to update the friends list in the game and unlocked the trophy. I can’t comprehend how this game still assumes 100 people in the friends list. The 100 friends limit has been upped for ages. It’s like they are using some ancient PS3 netcode. This also goes to show that nobody in the development team did proper testing on this. Another semi-glitched trophy is for doing a 20 meter jump in a rallycross event. It seems that it only unlocks in career mode, even though the trophy description makes it sound as if you can earn it in any mode. At least it’s achievable, just doesn’t seem to work in quickplay. These are minor issues though and the trophies are absolutely obtainable with these workarounds.
There’s a fair selection of racing cars and tracks in the game. Just don’t expect “normal” road vehicles. They are mostly high-end prototypes and some Formula One vehicles — nothing you’d ever see in street racing. What has to be said is that it can’t keep up with the amount of cars other racing sims have (such as Gran Turismo). The lack of “normal” cars you see on the road everyday was a bummer for me. Some popular vehicles such as the Ford Mustang are in there but highly customized and nothing like the versions you’d find for sale. Other popular cars are completely missing, for example the Lamborghini Murciélago and Bugatti Veyron are not in the game at all. You can select the color of your car but there’s no visual tuning.
The weather effects, especially rain, look really nice. When driving in rainy weather you see puddles of water on the road. Hitting the brakes while driving through the water can lead to aquaplaning. The rain drops on the car are static, though. The raindrops are just sitting still on your car and not moving as you drive. Thought that looked a little weird and unrealistic. Aside from this one thing the weather effects are great.
The game runs at butter smooth 60fps in 1080p resolution. At high speeds there tend to be some object pop-ins but since you’re focusing on the road you won’t notice it much. Given how comparably cheap the PS4 is to a gaming PC the performance is very satisfying. The graphics of the cars are very detailed. However, the surroundings / tracks (especially trees in the distance) are dull-looking. The rearview mirror has constant object popups but this is just something extra and had to be toned down to make the rest of the game run smooth.
| Gameplay *Overall Enjoyment Factor, Fascination with Game World, Level Design, Variety, Playability, User-Friendliness (Ease of Use / Readability / Controls / in-game Tutorials / Menus) |
| 8/10 Controls are hard to master, especially driving on ice. If you don’t usually play racing simulators there’s a big learning curve. |
| Story/Multiplayer *Quality of the Singleplayer Story, Cutscenes and/or Multiplayer Modes (whichever is available). If a game has no Story or no Multiplayer it won’t be rated (thus no negative effect on score). |
| 8/10 Campaign: 8/10 (many different motorsports disciplines) Multiplayer: 8/10 (repetitive but runs well) |
| Technical Aspects *Graphics, Texture Quality, Character Details, Lighting, Weather Effects, Animations, Loading Times, Number of Loading Screens, does it run smoothly |
| 8.5/10 Runs smoothly at 1080p60fps, but with noticeable texture pop-ins |
| Value *Amount of Content, Production Quality, Replay Value, is there enough content to justify a purchase |
| 8.5/10 Could’ve used more cars yet Time Trial adds solid replay value. Many motorsport disciplines. |
| Trophies/Achievements *Rates how much fun the Platinum / 1000 Gamerscore is to achieve: Are trophies fun to do? Do trophies restrict freedom of gameplay? Missable trophies? Multiple playthroughs required? Luck-based trophies? Pointless farming/grinding? Glitched Trophies? Are stats/trophies tracked correctly? |
| 7/10 Grindy online trophies, “What’s Yours Is Mine” is glitchy but obtainable. |
| Extraordinary Score Increase or Deduction *Reserved for extraordinarily good or bad features that the other categories don’t cover (such as game-breaking bugs). This score is directly added/subtracted from the final score. |
| Nothing |
VERDICT:
Project Cars 2 is a fine racing simulator with many different motorsport disciplines. It offers little new over the first Project Cars, but if it ain’t broke don’t fix it, right?
FINAL SCORE:
8/10
Reviewed on PS4 Pro (version 1.03) using EU retail copy. Finished the Career, played a bit of everything.
While you’re here, check out the Project Cars 2 Trophy Guide & Roadmap.
For more on how reviews are scored, check out the Review Policy.