Developers went back on their word of not releasing premium DLC. They also ruined the game with updates. Turned it from a FlatOut successor into a mediocre rally game.

Different tire types were added that have more or less grip depending on the surface they are on. So now, the only cars that feel viable on half the tracks are the few that have off-road tires. The rest will skid uncontrolably as soon as one of your wheels lands slightly off-track. This hampers your ability to avoid certain track hazards like crashes or debris. The courses were clearly not designed with this new system in mind and you can see evidence of this all around when you play them. For instance: It's not made clear what surface the game considers "dirt" or "off-road". Even the track description lumps both of them in as "ground". I've been told that anything that is off the main road is considered "off-road", but what about the slightly darker dirt off the beaten path on Grand Canyon? Why does the dirt that's next to the first turn and in front of the house on the farm/field map seem to make me spin out easier when it has no grass on top of it and uses the same texture as the road? Are the map sections that go underwater on Madagascar off-road? What about the water cave or jungle sections of Apocalyptic Now that are part of the main path? Most games address this by making sections off the beaten path obvious with either grass, sand, white lines or piled snow and give you more grip if you go off the track, slowing your car down and making it harder to turn. So you might get punished less severely for cutting corners in some racing sim than in this arcade car combat game where road embankments get completely destroyed by the 2nd lap and debris litters the streets.

Rubberbanding and skidless tires were added to the AI so you never feel like victory was earned. Sure, the AI is dumb, but at least you didn't feel coddled before. Your opponents had the same tools you did and it took skill to beat them. Now it feels like the other drivers are a bunch of cheaters that don't play by the same rules you do. If you do happen to beat them, you don't know how much of that was due to developer meddling. And if you lose, you can obviously blame it on the fact that they are superhuman. What's worse is that causing others to crash is now actively discouraged in this car combat game, because unless you manage to damage the rival vehicle so badly that you give it a permanent debuff troughtout the whole race, it's just going to rubberband right up next to you again, along with everyone else in the race. So don't even consider slowing down to trade paint and completely forget about all the FestApp challenges asking you to cause someone else to crash.

A "traction control" slider was added to the options menu which you will now constantly have to adjust because setting it to 0 causes most cars to spin out too easily and the 4x4s to feel just right. If you set it too high, the car will refuse to turn at higher speeds and automatically stop during sharper turns. A complexity the game didn't need because it causes you to pause and tweak the setting every few minutes. It will probably be one of those number-crunchingingly autistic min-maxing things you are going to need to do in order to be competitive and set record-breaking lap times.

The guy responsible for the new handling model also claims that somehow he's balanced the vehicles SO WELL that there is no chance one of the premium cars might become the meta for setting records. This while also saying that the off-road vehicles have been balanced to excel on "ground" courses. You'd think that aspect of the game isn't the focus, so it shouldn't really matter if competing becomes paying to win, but the devs clearly care enough to restrict some of the cheat vehicles from being able to record lap times and add the ability to see what car was used to achieve them.

The car stats and progression system make even less sense now. Apparently "power = top speed" and "acceleration = 0 to 100 KM/h time" wasn't clear enough, so now the cars also show "horsepower", "torque", "RPM" and "weight" which don't seem to correspond to any of the above. The different tire types will also add or subtract from the "control" stat which makes no sense because none of them provide high grip on all surfaces.

The progression system would have gone from grinding to unlock better cars to grinding to unlock cars that are pretty much the same. May I ask what then is the point of it? Or rather, may I ask what then is the point to having car classes to begin with, because clearly nobody cares about D or C class judging by the post-release content that has been added to the game.

In conclusion, I would say wait until development on the game has seized and then maybe pick up whatever bundle includes all the DLC on a sale, because the updates have also been messing with people's progress. One of the last few small ones deleted previously set lap times. I did the Halloween event that gave me the Sinner and Batcar, yet the Deadout mode tells me I still haven't unlocked them. My career mode progress went down from 100% completion because new challenges were added to it and I am hearing about even newer ones that I can't seem to locate. I don't know if it's a case of old ones being replaced or me having to use a fresh save. Either way, I don't feel like finding out right now.