It's a surprisingly in depth racing game. I thought it was just going to be Virtua Racer but there's a career mode spanning the last 4 decades of racing, with rivals (you can ♥♥♥♥ on other drivers and stuff) and the more they hate you the more aggressive they get and can do stuff outside of races, car upgrades, other teams upgrade their cars as the season progresses and quite a few tracks. You can rent car improvements off other teams and if they like or dislike you the price can go up or down. There's changing weather effects in the race and a forecast that isn't perfectly accurate. Car parts can wear and break and there's tire heat and stuff but it's not like I was expecting where all tyres wear the same, it changes based on cornering directions and breaking and stuff so they can wear at slightly uneven rates.

My main gripes are there's no marker to say 'this is how much fuel you need to do a lap when pitting so you have to do test runs to ballpark it, but after 2 trials and 4 laps of the GP you might forget 'was it 3 lines or 4?' You can pick a strategy and automate the process but I find a custom one is always much superior because it lets me do a one-stop strategy on soft tyres, not the mandatory hard otherwise.

The other gripe is about the morale of your staff, you're always pissing someone off, its unavoidable, whoever you pick gets a boost and whoever you don't gets a hit. So it becomes less about picking the response you want to over what you need to, sometimes there isn't even the right response, like one race I spun out and came 3rd or 2nd or something and it says 'who was to blame? pit crew or commercial!?' and I'm like '....me....?' but I can't pick that and blamed the most happy group, and why would it ever be commercial?

I'd give it an 8/10. The driving is simple enough even people who "hate all vehicle games" could enjoy it but complex enough to still be interesting.

It is quite good, but not for long term play. The AI cars are very aggressive as you get on in the game which would be bearable if you didn't always start last (no matter where you are in the championship) or if you could have races that are longer than 6 laps.

As it stands the starting at the back all the time and the short races mean that on the higher difficulty you don't have time to be patient and race, you just end up barging like the AI do which all gets a bit silly.

Shame as there is a lot of good things in the game.

One of the most fun racing games I played in years. Hope they will release a GT version of it, too.