Before I start. I want to lay my bias out so anyone reading this review can see how my opinion may be influenced and take that into account before deciding to purchase this game. I have played and reviewed the previous version of this game, Formula Fusion and despite my best efforts to enjoy the game, I didn't like it. In under 90 minutes I came to the conclusion that I wasn't having fun with the game and didn't want to touch the game again. As a result I refunded the game and quite rightly blasted it in my prior review. (Which has been deleted so I can write this review. If you want to see it, use the Wayback machine and look at this page at any point in October 2020 or earlier.)
I grew up with the Wipeout franchise since I was little and loved every Wipeout game to a greater or lesser extent. So when I see a potential spiritual successor to the franchise, I want it to do well. I bare no ill will to R8Games as a matter of fact, I have immense respect for them as former Wipeout devs, just like I have immense respect for 34BigThings since they are also former wipeout devs. I just want to be clear that it pains me to be writing this negative review. Anyway. Now that we've got that out of the way, let's get on with the review itself. I'll keep to the same format I did with my previous review, talking about each aspect individually, however this time I will include a comparison to how that aspect stacks up compared to Formula Fusion.

Pros -
Sound & Visual design - The game looks and sounds freaking beautiful! Wearing it's wipeout inspirations prominently on it's sleeve. Even more so than Formula Fusion. Nothing more to say here.

Quick Race mode flexibility - The quick race mode in Pacer has a great degree of customisation for one-off solo events. Including options to make a full-blown endurance race if you really want to go there or if you want to do a single lap sprint race, go for it. This is a HUGE improvement over Formula Fusion that had almost no flexibility aside from what track you race on. Now you can do an Anti-Gravity Formula 1 race if you want or even a Le Mans style 24 hour race, just turn the lap count all the way up to 999 and off you go. However, improvements could still be made to this mode to give even more flexibility, such as a damage modifier for weapons and/or collisions, making a race time based as opposed to lap count limited etc. but what is there is very good.

Craft customisation - Pacer brings in visual customisation for your crafts, note that this will have no effect in career mode however. You can select a primary colour for you craft from a list of options, an engine "flare" colour, a trail colour and some cosmetic components for the 4 remaining slots on your craft. Formula Fusion had no visual customisation at all, so this is a plus, however this system is very barebones as things stand right now. Hopefully it can be improved with post-launch updates. Despite it's limitations, I liked this personalisation.

Cons -
Performance - Overall Pacer is a very beautiful game, and an improvement on that front over Formula Fusion, however. This comes at the cost of overall performance. In Formula Fusion, the game ran like a dream on outdated hardware with out of date drivers with the only noticeable framerate drops being during loading screens. Pacer however runs inconsistently on my new rig which is driven by a 2080Ti, 64GBs of RAM, an intel i7-8700k and the game being stored to a high-speed PCIe SSD. My card is also running the latest Nvidia drivers.
The game will usually run smoothly however, there will be random major framerate drops for a couple of seconds or the game will freeze for several seconds for no reason. The game has never crashed for me though, from what I understand the framerate issues aren't widespread and are being looked into by R8Games. Additionally there are sound issues where the game will either play sound effects out of sync with what is going on in the game (e.g. you clip a wall briefly but the sound of the wall collision doesn't play for a half second) or the sound effects won't play at all (for example when firing the Gauss cannon, you won't hear the sound of your guns shooting or your shots hitting an opponent.) Also the music and/or engine noises will occasionally just stop while firing a weapon then carry on once you stop shooting. While the sound issues don't get in the way of gameplay, they are very noticeable especially considering the number of delays this game has had apparently to polish the game. So really, there should be no excuse for these performance issues.

Sense of speed - Formula Fusion nailed the Wipeout sense of speed... Pacer however, feels disconnected from what the Speedometer says in-game. The craft in Pacer feel very slow, the speedometer claims speeds in excess of 400kph going flat out down a straight but in reality it feels to me more like 40mph. So this is a significant step down from the previous iteration.

Loadouts - Formula Fusion's loadout system was in my opinion, terrible. Pacer has made improvements on this system, but as things stand right now there is also a major disconnect between what a modification claims to do, and what it actually does. For instance, an engine modification that claims to sacrifice durability, because it's meant to be more exposed and airbrake efficiency due to your craft's mass being increased in exchange for better acceleration could in reality not affect your airbrakes at all, knock your craft's durability down but also enhance your craft's turning speed in addition to the acceleration boost. And you can't even rely on the stat bars since the changes on them don't always reflect how a mod will affect your craft's performance. If it even does anything. The only way to know how an upgrade changes things is to apply it and then test it in quick race or campaign mode to figure out what it actually does. Additionally certain mods are just objectively better than everything else. And there is one of them in every category, rendering all the other mods pointless. In some respects, this system is better than in Formula Fusion, however due to the major balance and misleading stats issues as of November 1st, I have to say that the system overall is a step back from Formula fusion.

Weapons - Weapon loadouts have been separated from the craft modifications and put in their own menu, a welcome improvement from Formula Fusion. And extra weapons have been added to the game, increasing the number of weapons from six to 8 or 9. And the weapon modifications have also been carried over from Formula Fusion and improved upon, however you are still limited to picking 2 weapons per loadout with up to 2 mods each which you are then stuck with until you change your loadout again. In my opinion the entire weapon loadouts system still feels very restrictive especially since your weapons share ammo with each other and your craft can only hold a single weapon charge. Additionally weapon pickups have a fairly lengthy reset time compared to the Wipeout series. Meaning if you are in the midfield, chances are you will struggle to get weapon pick-ups at all but if you're out in the lead, you'll have no real difficulty getting them but you won't have anyone to shoot at and just end up wasting the pick-ups.

Controls - Currently control rebinding is completely broken. Also the game does not tell you the basic controls at all outside of the options menu. These controls could be displayed in the loading screen.

Difficulty - The bots are extremely dumb and there are no difficulty settings.

Overall impression: This game is definitely a improvement from Formula Fusion, however in certain regards it's also a downgrade. Did I enjoy my time with Pacer? Yeah, kinda. Enough to justify the £35 asking price? No. Even without the technical issues this game currently faces, I do not believe it is worth £35. Unfortunately in my opinion it's another swing and a miss from R8Games. :(