Recent reviews by BeachGaara

It's too short. Wait for a sale or bum it off your Big Brother. You can use the deluxe version once and you keep all the stuff, although only the cats-eye beads are worth anything past the first boss.

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's so hard. It makes me hate myself and life. Why did I buy it? What I fool I was.

9/10

Obviously there's the issues everyone talks about; the always online need and the shutting down in 18 months. Those alone are a pass.

My personal additional complaints are that single player is way too grindy. The XP you get for winning a tournament is pitiful. Add to that you can smash through coach challenges in one or two in-game months then can't upgrade to the next level until you a) earn the currency to pay for it (which is the same currency you use to buy cosmetics and is buyable with MTX) which is also given out in meagre amounts for obvious (MTX) reasons and b) reach a certain rank, which because of the aforementioned grindiness takes forever. They reduce training XP rewards because if you replay a training session you already did at that level you get less XP and you don't get many, and because of your stamina you can't undertake many games to get XP and my guy is always getting minor injuries even though I'm not in the stamina zone for injuries (IIRC 40%) so I'm having to take two months off every season to recover, which is crazy, two months to recover from a sore shoulder?

The faces look terrible too, would it have killed them to do face scans? You can just rent a truck, go to the next ATP Major and get all the faces bashed out in a few hours, like c'mon.

Oh and of course there's a battle pass... whoever invented paid battle passes should be shot. It was Fortnite wasn't it?

The tennis plays... OK, that's all I can say about it, it's just adequate.

All in all I'd give this maybe a 6/10 right now. I'd normally say buy it on a big sale but by the time it's cheap enough to be worth it it'll likely be months away from getting shut down.

It's disappointing because I loved Top Spin 4, played the ♥♥♥♥ out of it, still have it laying about somewhere... this is partly the same devs so they can do better.

Maybe 2K16 will be better....

Sad state of affairs when a indie roguelike ice hockey game is the best hockey game on pc.

Plays a lot like NHL '94, but there are abilities and stuff.

That's just not cricket

All the people giving it a thumbs down because their PC sucks should learn to read recommended specs and play on lowest settings. It runs fine for me. Only problem is lack of servers but I'm not going to slam them for that. That's life. They'll spin up more and it'll be fine.

Yeah there's bugs but it's EA. That's my other problem with the negative votes is if it's not "my PC blows" it's "why isn't this just released EA game AAAA quality and bug free!? >:(". Sort your head.

It's 7 but better.

Why do I have to pay $10 bucks a year just to be able to fix jank and nonsense? Wasn't so bad when it was like 3 dollars.

They fixed most of the problems, all the major ones. Added new features. With the new Ray tracing features it looks amazing, best reflections I've ever seen. Cars drive much nicer. There's water effects and all that, basically a big physics rework.

It's basically where it should have been at release.

Blades are super OP though so might not want to go that route if you want a challenge.