Project Cars should this have been allowed to be released?

[SvennoJ]

Well at least the text is easily readable on a projector, it doesn't do the graphics much good though.
I played for another 3 hours, finished the kart championship, which wasn't too bad after getting the hang of it. The physics are a bit questionable and the handling is very twitchy, but I guess that comes with karts. 6/10 for kart racing.

Then I got offered an invitational to drive a Bac Mono on Shetterton or something. Hmm, cars do not feel realistic at all. I don't know what's worse, the tendency to start fish tailing after a corner due to the input lag, the brain dead AI driving into you, during qualifying no less, or the almost complete lack of auditory feedback from the tires. You don't know you're actually skidding until you see the nose of the car pointing too far into the corner. Rumble feedback is there but that starts too early, not that helpful.

The sense of speed and distance isn't that great either. I don't use the driving line or other braking cues and normally don't have a problem judging braking distances. In PCars I definitely need help from the signs along the track. Despite PCars being 60 fps, DC has lower input lag, better sense of speed, and is easier to judge distance in.
Anyway after an hour I had the Bac Mono under control, qualified first and won the race. Still not sure if the driving is actually fun. Felt like doing an egg race.

After that I tried out the Nordschleife in a LMP car. That track does look better than the rest so far and is also a step up, albeit a small one, from GT6' rendition. Rain still looks crap, but at least the track becomes reflective which GT6 doesn't do. I had set it up so it started down pouring half way through the race (you can define 4 stages of weather per race), which rendered my car from getting into first to almost undriveable. Too bad the AI doesn't care about rain nor obstacles as after the rain started I had 31 cars ploughing through me, destroying my car. Retry, damage off, can do max 80 on most of the track in the heavy rain, realistic. I wanted to test the difference with full wet tires but for some reason the rain glitched out. Btw AI cars don't care about grass and sand traps either, doesn't slow them down...

Hearing the pit boss through the DS4 speaker is a nice feature, although it scared the crap out of me the first time it happened. "BEEP great first lap BEEP". "Thanks, now I'm in the wall"
Maybe I can improve the handling a bit by tweaking the dead zone. Making minor high speed course corrections with the big default dead zone plus input lag is very tricky.


TLDR: Handling is a big step back from GT6, AI sucks, sound mix is lousy (can't hear the tires, collision sounds are either missing or deafening, sounds like the competition is much closer behind you than they actually are)

It's a challenge and I'm still curious to drive on the tracks I don't know yet, but so far it's a 6/10 game, unpolished, quite rough around the edges. It's the only (attempt at a) sim racer on ps4 currently, so I guess if you can't wait for GT7 you can give it a try. I won't recommend it to any friends though.