Project CARS

I original got Project CARS free from Games with Gold with Xbox and it went straight into the backlog despite having some online achievements. I started playing Project CARS after a friend of mine posted about the community events being stopped – of which there is a related achievement which is now discontinued. If you are starting Project CARS now, you will not be able to get all the achievements. You have been warned.

This has taken the best part of six months for me to finish for the simple reason that there is soooooo much racing that needs to be done.

Project CARS is a racing game with the tag line, ‘a racing game by racers for racers’ or something like that. When I started playing I was immediately afraid that I wouldn’t be able complete the game at all. Getting a car around the track in one go proved impossible. That said, I started on the Pro setting. After epically failing, I dumbed it right down to amateur and found that I could then get a car round the track and my hope for completion was restored but only after I managed to win the first go karting race.

As mentioned above, there is a lot of racing that needs to be done. There is a career mode which sees you go from racing the above mentioned go karts all the way up to LMP 1 – which are the cars that do the Le Mans 24-hour race. There is an online mode where you race against other people with a long list of customisable settings; the community events in which you use a specific car to on a specific course to set the fastest time... And then there’s free play… but that’s it. The main feature of the game that I didn’t use was for customising and tuning the cars. I used default settings but this is a big part of the game for racing enthusiasts and something that sets it apart from other racing games.

The one shit thing about career mode is that you get invitational events that you enter year on year. There are a limited amount of these that come up but there doesn’t appear to be anything that shows which ones you won and which ones you haven’t raced so I found myself manually checking each time an even came round until I got it sorted in my head which ones I had done. It doesn’t help that a lot of them have similar names too.

The career mode is purely driven on your performance in various classes and there is no money with which to buy new cars. The sheer amount of races that come up here though, is quite daunting but more on that later.

Graphically, it’s very pretty and lots of detail has been put in to the courses and cars. Musically, it does that thing where it tries to be operatically epic but this is almost cliché at this stage.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 45 Achievements

Despite being a racing game, it doesn’t half make you do a lot of shit. And it will take a long time. Outside of the multiplayer and community events I’ve mentioned above, the career mode alone will be a time sync. You basically have to win 16 of the main championships which equates to 16 full seasons of racing. Thankfully you can reduce the season length to minimise the race lengths but several championships will have you completing races that are five laps minimum with a mandatory pitstop. Oh, and you also have to defend a championship 3 times, which means you have to complete the same seasonal championship 4 times in a row.

Outside of career mode, there is a lot of random stuff to do but most of it can be done in free play mode using specific cars on specific tracks. A few are worth mentioning though. One achievement requires you to finish 3 consecutive laps within 0.1 seconds of each other. I actually think this is impossible without letting an AI driver do it for you. There is another one that can be done without doing anything and that’s completing the California highway in under 9 minutes in an American Car. If you simulate it from the start, the AI will complete this is around seven and a half minutes.

There is another pain in the ass that can’t be AI done and that’s for completing the Monaco Grand Prix circuit in reverse. Such a pain in the ass as the bends are tight and you can’t crash. However that’s not the worst one. The game also wants you to race continuously for 24 hours. This is utter madness but at least it can be simulated from a race perspective. However, don’t do what I did and leave the penalties on. I thought it would be fine and my AI driver would race by the rules. Apparently not, as I came home from work to find him parked up in the garage after being disqualified.

Multiplayer

I didn’t have much of an interaction with the online community and after my experience on Forza Horizon, I had no interest in doing so from the beginning. One of my friends was kind enough to lend me some of his time to grind out the online achievements in private match ups.

Essentially this boiled down to winning 51 races or at least finish in the podium positions. This is a little quirk of the game’s achievements. The description states ‘more than 50 races’… so 51 races then. Thanks.

In addition to this there is a scary but funny one. You have a win a race using manual gears with no driving aids using cockpit view. This may seem daunting at first but I started up a race with one other random. Another quirk of Project CARS is that the start of a race is totally manual if you set it up without driving aids. But no one reads the sets up apparently as the guy I was racing went storming off the line before the green light and was immediately disqualified. All I had to do was get around the track in one piece. What I didn’t know though is that Monza short course has a chicane at the end that cuts off half the road. I smashed into the barrier and nearly fucked my car beyond working… but it could still go in first gear so I hobbled across the line and unlocked the achievement.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Project CARS was a very rewarding, time consuming completion that did offer some racing fun but long outstayed its welcome in terms of going for the 100%. I’ve had my fill of racing games now though and won’t be buying any new ones. Hopefully reviews of Forza 5, Forza 3 and Forza Horizon 2 will follow.