Here's my mini review at level 15.
The Good
1. The car selection is nice. It's great to see some of these cars represented. It's also nice to see even your starter cars can switch classes by upgrading. It's nice to see the attention to detail. The engine sounds great and guages are unique and representative of each car.
2. It does seem like a labor of love, looks like effort was obviously put in it to make it a good game. The design and presentation is outstanding. Unique event posters are a nice touch, live motion intro videos are okay, but please for the love of god make them skip-able. I think I can get my mind around what a time attack means without Vaughn Gittin Jr. explaining it to me.
3. There is no grinding in this game at all. Money tends to stack up quickly so far, events open up way before you get to them sequentially if you race well. Lots of free cars is also a plus. Gran Turismo serie's design of race this race 5 million times and then grind licenses doesn't apply here. A+, a game should be about the excitement of racing and the cars, not the "real life" effort it takes to grind to buy one. Cars and upgrades can be sold for 100% of their purchase value.
4. Night races are awesome. They just feel natural and provide a good change of pace and look.
The Mediocre
1. Graphics are alright at best. Environments, especially backgrounds don't look very good, lighting is above average. Car models are okay, but don't compare to say Dirt 2 in DX11 mode. Texture detail is pretty decent on the environments and trees do not look very convincing (Simbin/SMS would benefit from licensing some Speedtree for this game).
2. Vaughn Gittin Jr. talks way too much, it's sort of like Dirt 2 in a way, repeating himself way too much. I can't count how many time's he's told me to attack the first corner.
3. The helmet view is very pretty. It would be great for replays, but I cannot use it at all for racing. It's not really the motion that is disorienting as much as it is the low field of view with it on. It's a good try and may work better on large TVs, but on my 17.3" laptop screen, it's just too much.
4. Autolog seems cool, but I don't have any friends that both game on the PC and want to play a non arcade racing game so I haven't really tried it out.
The Bad
1. The artificial intelligence has a heavy emphasis on artificial, this is going to be a 3 part answer.
*Firstly, god damned rubber-band effect. I don't know who thought of it way back in the day of racing games, but there is a special place in hell for someone like that. It's an AI system that punishes a player for doing well and rewards a player for playing poorly. Did you just pull off 2 perfect laps back to back? Uh oh, the split time means that whoever is behind you and in front of you will now speed up to compensate.
I remember using an Audi R8 with many upgrades to have a 999 rating C car, the highest possible for Class C. I then remember running a race 5 times because I would claw up to 2nd place and then chase the same opponent R8 that magically could out accelerate and out turn me. I only eventually won because the AI is not very consistent.
* Secondly, about that consistency. Drivers will be faster or slower depending on the race and even the lap. I've seen 3-4 second differences in times running the same race with the same cars on the same track. If you do poorly on a race, you can just restart it until you find whatever random number generator spawns all your opponents to be extra slow this race. Also, it still adjusts to your skill level.
For example,
Lap 1 you run a 1:52.1
Lap 2 you run a 1:42.5
Lap 3 you run a 1:45
Lap 4 you run a 1:42.8
On lap 1 you'll always launch pretty quickly and accelerate well (at least I do since I upgrade my cars to exactly the top of their class). You brake late and get into a turn taking a very aggressive line and then you advance from 5th to 2nd. 2nd lap you pull it off perfectly and get to 1st place putting a 2-4 second lead on 2nd place. Then lap 3 comes around and you run a decent lap but not a perfect one and 1st place shoots past you going way faster than they had shown potential for just 1 lap ago so that even in a perfect corner you aren't able to catch up, much less pass them (And forget about out accelerating them on a straight, if your car does 3.3 second 0-60 their car does 3.2 when they're on the rubber band boost). Then the last lap comes around and the AI oftentimes seems to get a speed boost on the last lap, setting another record fastest lap while you fall further behind even if you drove perfectly.
It's extremely frustrating. Whatever happened to normal AI?
* Thirdly they are aggressive as hell. If you and the AI are on the same corner but the AI tries to pass and does it incorrectly, going into the grass, you can bet your ass they are going to turn in and get back on the track at all costs even if you still inhabit that section of the track they need to get to, ramming you out of the way. Pull an Aryton Senna and brake late, diving into the inside line of an opponent by out-braking him and you can bet your ass that the AI will ram you out of the way to move into that inside line anyways.
2. Then there's the crash physics. AI cars don't suffer nearly as much from hitting you as you do hitting them. Lightly tap an AI opponent and you lose all car control for as long as you are touching them. AI slams into you and they drive on their merry way after a very short recovery period 9fractions of a second) while spinning you into a tree. It feels like everything in this game is made of iron and your car is a freaking super magnet. God forbid the aggressive AI side swipes you in a corner because you're going to be stuck to that AI for a while since you've lost all control. If the AI hits you into parallel into a wall, expect to rid the wall for a bit and on some tracks even get stuck to the wall requiring quite a bit of steering lock to get away from it.
The Ugly
1. The controls are abhorrent. It feels like you're telling the gamepad to tell the driver in the car to turn the wheel instead of having direct control over the car. At default, control is absolutely non linear. Move your stick 1-10 degrees left, watch the car slowly drift left at minutes of arc per second if that. Move your stick 15 degrees left or more and watch your car take a full lock turn quickly speeding off the track.
For the Xbox 360 controller, I found this to work well:
[edited for a better setup]
Steering Dead Zone: 3
Steering Sensitivity: 57
Throttle Dead Zone: 6,
Throttle Sensitivity: 67
Braking Dead Zone: 6
Braking Sensitivity: 67
Speed Steering Sensitivity: 27
There's still a little bit of speed sensitivity issues but I'll keep working on it. Imagine a constant radius corner where speed determines steering ratio so as you slow down, the car stops holding the line you set and starts turning ever more sharply.
Car tuning: Set as desired but recommend extra tuning for understeer. These cars love to oversteer everywhere.
a setting of 50 is supposedly perfectly linear according to the devs and it does feel much better, but it's still not perfect. I'll perfect it later.
2. The keys on the windows version do not change with a gamepad plugged in like it does with every other game. Title screen still says press Enter to continue as well as other screens listing keys like U,I,Backspace and a weird looking square up arrow that I later figured out was shift (not any shift mind you, that would make too much sense, right shift only).
As a rule of thumb:
A:Enter
B:Backspace
X:R
Y:F
Right Shoulder:K
Left Shoulder:J
Right Trigger:I
Left Trigger:U
Start:Right Shift
Back:Autolog
Overall It's a nicely presently game with adequate multi-platform graphics that is marred by dodgy AI and poor controls. It's not all bad, but it is a hell of a lot harder than it should be. It's got some good ideas and does improve on the predecessor, but like Shift has a couple fatal flaws that needs some patching. 7.75/10 (Fairly decent but not wow-ing me)
Verdict:
Buy
Wait
Sell
All screenshots are taken at maximum settings and AA. Tip: turn off motion blur or put it on low, IMO it looks pretty terrible with it on as can be seen in these screens.
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