Project Cars 3

Have seen some really favourable feedback online about this. The very sim focused people obviously not, but general feeling seems positive, or better than they expected.
 
Have seen some really favourable feedback online about this. The very sim focused people obviously not, but general feeling seems positive, or better than they expected.
This is why I changed my mind about the game, after watching a large amount of gameplay videos it started to sound like a fun game. Only the sim fans had negative comments but every other gamer had positive feedback.

Well it's installing now so I will find out later on.
 
I have just finished the first championship which involved 5 races and these are my thoughts so far.

Just to be clear I am playing it on the PS4 Pro.

It's Grid 3, it's almost identical in every way to Grid 2, I think Codematers was working on Grid 3 and then handed it to Slightly Mad when they bought them.

The graphics are all over the place, one minute it looks good the next a blurry blocky mess, the cars ahead of you are low resolution and the wings on the back of those cars look like they have been lifted from a 1990's game. In my first race which was at dusk I could barely see the speedo and rev counter it was so blocky, then in the next race set in the daytime it was clear and looked good. At the end of a race the camera flicks to a chase cam mode and for the first 3 to 5 seconds every car on screen is just a solid block of colour until they get drawn in.
I have the graphics set to the highest resolution setting and haven't tried the framerate setting yet.

I am playing this with the controller and it's superb, the cars respond and handle really well to the inputs and everything feels tight.

The car sounds are nothing special and sounds dull when compared to other car games, it's not a simulator of course but I am sure a walrus playing an organ made these car sounds. Digital plop.

I set the AI to Hard and the aggressive level to high, they give you a good challenge for about 3/4 of the race then they seem to slow down and you end up winning with a 7 or 8 second gap. I will increase the difficulty and see how I get on. The AI also seem to break all the laws of physics and will brake 500yds before a corner but somehow avoid slowing down, you can be neck to neck with an AI car and it brakes while your still going flat out and you don't move ahead of it, when you brake 2 to 3 hundred yards later the AI drive around you at high speed and you come out the corner 2 or 3 car lengths behind it.

The racing is really fun though with you being knocked around whilst always fighting for position, one simple mistake can cost you 7 or 8 places.

One other thing i would like to mention are the amount of button presses after each race, you have to press a button 7 times with a 3 to 4 second gap in between each press just to end that race. It's totally ridiculous and there is no need for it at all.
 
I tried using the steering wheel earlier and it is unusable no matter what settings you adjust. In the default profile the car starts to sway from left to right the faster you go, once you hit 80mph you loose all control of the steering and spin out.
Next I tried using the in game calibration system which solved the swaying of the default setting but now the wheel needs an almost full turn just to move a little to the left or right.
The feedback system just makes up what the wheel does, on a straight track with no cars around you it feels like you being slammed from all directions and driving over a cattle grid.
 
The opposite to the first two then, wheel was great, controller took hours of tweaking to get anywhere near useable.
 
Enjoying this....a bit rough around the edges but great fun with a controller.

Handling feels just right and certainly does remind me of Driveclub!
 
I'm gonna throw my thoughts into the ring and deliberately doing so after only approx 3 hours on it (playing on PS4 Pro with higher resolution selected as opposed to framerate), my intention is to post an update when I've sank more time into it to see if my view changes.

I intentionally sat back and waited on some impressions videos before deciding if this was for me, mainly due to being confused and worried about the marketing and with what direction this was going in and whether SMS gamble was going to pay off. I watched some vids and even though most were negative and diverse I still opted to take a punt on it because most negative thoughts seemed to centre around the fact SMS had essentially ditched their Community Assisted Racing Simulation (CARS) mantle to push for a more arcade easy to pick up racer. A lot of the conclusions drawn up online is that it isn't worthy of the Project CARS title but heres the thing, to me it ultimately looked like it could be fun and guess what......... it is (to me at least and this is only my opinion)

So far this is kind of like my guilty pleasure of racing games, quite addictive and a nice pick up and play kinda game with some nice arcadey handling that is extremely similar to last year's Grid and if you ignore the fact it's called Project Cars it could easily pass as a Grid spin off. Now its not without its issues some of which can be frustrating, graphics as @DAZ UK 74 as said are very hit and miss, I've even encountered glitches when in the cockpit view, the Ai can be a pain in the ass to overtake when they're packed so tightly and they seem to be superhuman in wet conditions but ultimately I'm having a lot of fun with it so far and it has that 'one more try' pull to entice you to tick off all the race objectives (corner mastering, overtakes etc) even if you have finished in 1st place.

From the time I've played so far I really do like the track variety but then I always thought PC2 had a good selection of tracks especially some of the smaller British venues like Oulton Park and Snetterton, plus there is a variety of events from standard races, hot laps and break out (drive into billboards to rack up a score to beat a target) and I think I've read somewhere that there are 210 cars included, not sure how different they are all going to feel to drive as I've only drove 3 so far but time will tell. My conclusion is that if you enjoyed Grid then you'll get something out of this, if some are still unsure then wait for sale price but I certainly recommend it. I only hope they can and will iron out the kinks and not give up on it due to bad press or feedback, the reality could be they churned it out as a kinda filler until Dirt 5 releases but I sincerely hope not.
 

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