It is hard to describe the feeling of disappointment in something you looked forward to for so long. It happened with Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown, it happened with Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III (2023), and now it has happened with Project Motor Racing. The brief moments of fun are overshadowed by a myriad of technical issues and bugs.
First things first, Project Motor Racing has been in development for about three years and had plenty to be excited about at release. Crossplay among consoles and PC was the biggest attraction for me, along with the opportunity to drive some of the most modern racing cars available. I went into my time with the game ahead of release with high hopes, which were almost immediately dashed.
For this review, I played using both a controller and two different wheel & pedal setups, so I could get a well-rounded experience of the handling and feel of the cars. One of the biggest attractions of Project Motor Racing is the depth of the career mode, so I hopped in there first. First, you can name your team and driver, and then choose how you want to begin your career mode. You have the choice of starting with $100,000, $650,000, or $2,000,000, so it really depends on which series you want to begin with. Naturally, I started with the $100,000 option and bought the MX-5 Miata.
“Graphically, Project Motor Racing is decent enough.”
Moving on to series choice, I went with the United Kingdom MX-5 Trophy series, which featured two races to whet the appetite. Each race in the game follows the same format: Practice, Qualify, Race, so I got on track for the 10-minute practice session and found that the car handled a bit differently than I had expected. Thinking it was a new-game learning curve, I soldiered on and eventually figured out how to wrestle the car around the Northampton circuit (a name stand-in for the F1 track Silverstone) enough to set a top 5 lap time in qualifying.
As for the race, my choice to run on a controller betrayed me immediately, as I realized the game does not use rolling starts, and I had not yet figured out the buttons for shifting gears. After a quick pause when the lights went green to check the button bindings, I was back in the game. I quickly learned that the in-game AI tends to ignore that you exist.
Several times, I tried to pass a car while it stuck to the racing line, only to have it turn in as we went side by side into a corner. Following cars into corners was also risky, since the AI drivers tend to take corners far slower than expected, which led to many bumps from behind as I anticipated a much higher cornering speed.
This AI behaviour was not limited to lower difficulty settings. I found my pace sweet spot around 75 (out of 100, with a minimum setting of 25), yet the on-track behaviour remained as unaware as at lower settings. Moving to different classes of cars produced the same results. I even started a new career with the $2,000,000 starting wallet and purchased the Aston Martin Vantage GT3.
As mentioned above, I had to wrestle with the MX-5 to get it around the track, and I thought that was due to the learning curve on a controller and a new game. It soon became worse when I switched to a wheel-and-pedal setup. With the controller, feedback from the car and road came through consistently, even if only as different levels of vibration. With the wheel, the feedback was either fully on, fully off, or a mix of the two.
There was one instance where I did a race in the GT3 Aston Martin with full force feedback on, and then did another race in the same car with no feedback at all, despite changing nothing but the track. Most of the time, I experienced what I can only describe as the feedback slipping and then catching itself again.
To explain, the wheel is designed to provide some level of resistance when cornering or in situations where the car is not level (for example, a banked corner like Daytona). Several times, I felt the wheel’s resistance as expected, only for that resistance to let go. This caused me to jerk the wheel further into the turn, feel the feedback kick back in, correct the sudden oversteer and, more often than not, spin out and crash. It was incredibly frustrating to have this happen multiple times in a lap, let alone during an entire race.
Thinking it was an issue with the wheel itself, I swapped it for another Logitech wheel-and-pedal set and had the exact same thing happen. It did not seem to matter what I did to the in-game feedback settings. The cars simply would not drive in a predictable way, and at no point did I feel I could place the car where I wanted it on track. For a racing game, that is a damning situation to find yourself in.
Graphically, Project Motor Racing is decent enough. Playing on PS5, I didn’t really experience any frame rate drops or visual glitches. I wasn’t wowed by what I saw; it was just ‘good enough’. Replays and spectating make it feel like the game came out early in the previous console generation, for how they look. Even in rainy weather, things weren’t exactly top tier.
“In Project Motor Racing, it is very clear you are playing a game, which breaks immersion.”
Colours look bland, especially the normally vibrant greens of the Nordschleife that usually pop and make you feel like you are there. In Project Motor Racing, it is very clear you are playing a game, which breaks immersion.
Multiplayer is where many players will spend most of their time in Project Motor Racing, and there is some promise to it. There are three options for gameplay: Ranked, Custom Lobby and Social. Ranked is where you take part in a championship over several days on a preselected track-and-car combination. With options for most car classes and tracks, there is likely to be something for everyone.
Before taking part in Ranked, however, you must pass a licence test where you race against three AI drivers for eight laps at Lime Rock in the MX-5. The goal is to complete the race in under eight minutes and 35 seconds, and it does not matter where you place. As long as your total time is less than eight and a half minutes, you pass the test and can join Ranked lobbies as you wish.
Custom Lobby is exactly what it sounds like. It is a mode where you can set up the race as you want, with up to 32 drivers on track at once and up to four different vehicle classes. Multi-class enthusiasts can rejoice. Set the practice and qualifying times, the number of laps for the race and the weather as you like, and you are ready to go.
Social lets you choose from a number of different lobbies with pre-selected settings and vehicle/track layouts. It’s somewhere you can jump in at a moment’s notice and race within a few minutes.
“There is a great game here somewhere, but you have to dig very deep to find it.”
On the face of it, Project Motor Racing’s multiplayer appears to have the capacity to offer fun and exciting racing against players around the world on different platforms, and it seems to be a bright spot in the well of disappointment I have experienced so far.
Project Motor Racing also offers endurance challenges in the Challenges tab of the main menu. These range from 43 laps at Spa in the LMDh class to 10 laps at the Nürburgring Nordschleife 24 Hours in a GT3 car, to 69 laps at Lexington in the GTO class. All of these have you racing against the AI, so keep that in mind if you plan to attempt any of them.
Where I hope there is significant interaction is in Project Motor Racing’s mods. At the time of writing, there were no mods available for download, but the possibilities are exciting, ranging from cars to liveries to races and more. Similar to how Assetto Corsa successfully uses mods to enhance the game, I hope that can be the case here.
The biggest letdown is the price. At $94 CAD, Project Motor Racing is not good enough to warrant the cost, and I would argue there is not a single game on the market for PS5, Xbox or PC that is worth that amount. There is also a Season Pass for an additional $67 CAD if you did not buy the Year-One edition of the game.
I genuinely wanted to like Project Motor Racing, especially after I was let down by Rennsport, but there are too many issues this close to release for me to feel comfortable recommending it. Hopefully, the game experiences a rise similar to that of Cyberpunk 2077 and becomes something great. I want that to be the case, because there is a great game here somewhere, but you have to dig very deep to find it.
