The sim racing community is a funny one, with almost everyone having their opinion on what is the best title, what is a true simulator and not just arcade (or sim-cade if it’s further to the sim side). The Assetto Corsa series has carved out a nice section of the genre for itself with titles like Assetto Corsa, Assetto Corsa Competizione, and now, the upcoming Assetto Corsa EVO, with the latter looking to be the biggest yet. I got to take a look at the game during its early access period, and this is what I was able to take away from the time.
Having spent most of my sim-racing career playing Gran Turismo 7 and the F1 series of games, I was very keen to jump into a PC-based sim to see how things are different and how similar they are. However, my experience came to a grinding halt when I booted up the game and found that, while the game recognized my wheel and pedals, I needed to map every single button to a command.
There were no button presets, which is both good and bad, in my estimation. Having solely played GT7 and F1, I was used to having my buttons pre-mapped out for the relevant functions. As such, I wasn’t even really sure what I needed to have mapped out. An hour and a half later, I had everything sorted (I think) and was ready to hit the track.
This is where the gameplay variety kind of came to a very fine point. Assetto Corsa EVO only offered one real option for actual racing available, and it was against the AI. The online capability was something that the developers had hoped would be available for Early Access, but at the time of writing a couple of weeks later, the feature still remains inaccessible. So, off to the track with the AI I went and I was thoroughly impressed.
“The next couple of early access periods will be the true test of the product to see if Assetto Corsa EVO has the capability of living up to the hype.”
Assetto Corsa EVO offers players the option to race on five different tracks with a total of 8 different layouts: Brands Hatch (both Full Course and Indy layouts), Imola, Suzuka (East, GP, and West layouts), Mount Panorama, and Laguna Seca. Each track looks amazing visually and is very true-to-life in that what you see on the screen is going to be, as near as makes no difference, what you get if you visit that track in real life.
In addition to the five tracks, there are 20 cars available for players to drive around in, from manufacturers such as Abarth, Ferrari, BMW, and more. There is something for all manner of speed as well, with some of the cars being akin to daily drivers and some, like one from Porsche, being a full-fledged GT3 race car.
“As an experience meant to give the players something to whet their appetite for more, Assetto Corsa EVO certainly managed to do that for me.”
As for how the cars handle, I was thoroughly impressed with what I experienced. For the most part, all of the cars were very “get in and go”, in as much as they were very accessible to even the most green of racing drivers out there. Even in rainy conditions, there was never a sense that if a car began to slide or spin, I couldn’t wrangle the car back to pointing in the correct direction and avoiding a crash.
The cars feel like they have weight, and you can feel the understeer (and oversteer, at times) if you take a sharp bend too ambitiously, which was a learning curve I had to adjust at Suzuka’s hairpin following the Degner corners.
As an experience meant to give the players something to whet their appetite for more, Assetto Corsa EVO certainly managed to do that for me. With this being the first of (apparently) six early access periods, I am eager to see what else the developers will be adding to the experience each time, as, for now, simply running races against the AI can become repetitive.
A license center and Special Events tab are seen in the game menu but are currently unavailable for players to jump in, joining the online section in my “Try again later” list. While disappointing to not be able to try these game modes out I still had enough racing to do to make me want to come back for more.
The next couple of early access periods will be the true test of the product to see if Assetto Corsa EVO has the capability of living up to the hype. With the inclusion of a free-drive area that has been adapted from the area surrounding the famed Nürburgring, the iconic Eifel region of Germany, totalling 1600 square km of laser-scanned realism, there is a lot to look forward to.
