Recent reviews by Kita

*No hour-long tutorial
*No character creator
*Not a single line of voice acted dialog
*No licensed music
*No celebrities
and it just gets better from there!

This is a racing game featuring the real-life Tokyo Metropolitan Expressway, which is a cultural icon all its own with several movies and comics dedicated to the street racing that happens there. As such, this game is different from Need for Speed-type games that take place in fictional cities with roads specifically crafted for high speed. You race one-on-one with another car in a sort of unlimited drag race to see who can get ahead of who first. Your status in battles is represented by a Spirit gauge which functions like a health meter in a fighting game. That's kind of what the battles in TXR play out like, especially when cars are evenly matched. Banging doors and bumping depletes a little bit of SP, slamming into traffic or walls depletes a lot, and dropping behind more than 20 meters is a KO.
So the races work a bit like a puzzle: How do you get past the other car without hitting anything? This is Versus Tetris at 180 miles an hour.

however, that leads me into some bugs:
-first off, the AI is incredibly aggressive when ahead, often ramming or blocking late, but when they're behind they're as timid as a puppy and unless they have a power advantage will never try to catch back up even if they can. even AI that are very fast brake very early for turns and in strange places, causing you to slam into the back of them if you are slipstreaming.
finally, the AI panic brake if you swerve in front of them and will rarely follow your car closer than 10m, causing them to lose the draft and be uncompetitive. if you look behind you while an ai is in your slipstream, you'll notice that once they get within 3 carlengths, they start to swerve around and brake to avoid you, killing their momentum even if they could have passed you.
I personally like the aggressive ai and would like them to be just as aggressive when behind as when ahead, even if that means getting rammed. I would like to see the AI utilize the drafting technique to overtake the player again.
-the audio mixing isn't great, the engine sounds are very quiet and modifying the muffler doesn't change the tone much if at all. turbo engines could also use better induction noise though the blowoffs are pretty sweet.

personal preferences:
-the suspension and diff settings that make the car oversteer or understeer more ought to be explained or shown on a graph, as the way TXR shows these settings is not common to simulators or other arcade games. the tires in general could also use less grip and the cars should start out less stable in corners. Consider the way cars in game drive with nearly-fully-worn tires as the baseline instead. (try this with the NB MX5 it slaps)

Recent updates significantly improved the handling physics and performance.
There is still a countersteer assist on controller that I'm not a fan of but it makes the game easy to play on the Steam Deck, which it also runs great on.
Much appreciation goes to the CarX team who did a great job listening to feedback and adjusting the driving model. A lot of things can still be done to improve things like collision physics and AI racer intelligence, the generated AI voiceovers are a bit annoying, and the level grind to unlock vehicles is harsh with strange level tier choices like the large gap between DC2 and STR despite being mechanically the exact same vehicle.

This game plays a bit like a simulator, with fuel usage and tire wear, highly detailed suspension adjustment, drivetrain tuning, multiple tire compounds, multiple fuel types, etc. but it's presented in a streamlined "mobile game" format that might turn people off at first. Your tires change automatically as they wear out while driving, when you run out of tires to swap they finally pop. However, there's no real effect to your grip or handling as the tires wear out, Likewise with the fuel usage, while installing a larger fuel tank will increase the weight of your car and change its balance, actually USING that fuel does not reduce the weight of the vehicle while you are driving it, as in a simulator. So while the underlying driving model is highly realistic, the gamey elements based on the simulation are very arcade so the game is CASUAL streamlined and easy to play. Stopping for fuel and tires, weirdly, is a very fun little diversion that feels realistic, and reminiscent of classic tuner MMO Drift City and its Mittron stations.
If you don't like how your vehicle drives you can tweak and tune every last adjustable part until it launches and corners and slides just the way you want it to. Just like in real life, this costs a little money. Sure, you can fast travel to the tuner, but it'll cost you. Racing people online? The stakes are real and PVP races require a buy-in. This is an immersive street racing simulator more than it is a simple racing game, yet it never goes far enough on the realistic end to be annoying, a good balance but perhaps not far enough in either direction for some people.

nigel mansell broke into my garage at night and painted my car pink.
goty

pro drift tires are amazing, a much needed addition.
really happy to see EA not abandoning another NFS game after 6 months.
now, if we can just get back the feature from Heat where races took place in real time on the freeroam MP map this might be one of the best NFS games of all time.

Fun game until the devs decided it was a hardcore skill-based-ranked-matchmaking PVP e-sports shooter and the guns needed "balance" instead of more explosions. Gimmie my sickle mags back you nerds.

>Added Japanese voiceover for all regions

Well played.

good:
it's got "jdm" cars and tuning i guess

bad:
long load times
poor driving physics make tuning pointless
slow ai
all songs on the soundtrack basically sound the same
annoying VHS filter and "handheld camcorder" graphical style that doesn't even make sense because nobody played video games thru a recording to tape
quite possibly the worst rendition of the Tokyo Metro Expressway ever built. All challenging or iconic corners are gone -- the "C1" is all tunnel.

my recommendation to the developer:
cut out the VHS filter and cringey depressioncore vaporwave. i love that stuff too but it's old meme now, you missed the boat by about 5 years. focus on making cars that drive realistically and a map that is fun to drive in. Right now you have what looks and plays like a fake game from an instagram ad. if you absolutely must have "oldschool" visual style use a filter that looks like an RF adapter so your game will actually look like a PS2 title and not an ad for a mobile game.
You should probably keep in mind that your competition in the Weeaboo JDM Cruise Game space is Assetto Corsa and it's terabytes of mod content. Why would I play your game when AC has the REAL shutoko, the REAL cars, REAL physics, and REAL people to race?

MTC has a great career mode, decent graphics and lots of control options. It has some good track design and fun arena layouts. The collision physics in truck vs truck situations are pretty good with lots of flips and tire locking and the AI doesn't really cheat. On the hardest difficulty they provide a reasonable challenge but crash just as much. It plays a lot like Wreckfest but with monster trucks.

However the physics are terrible. The vehicles in this game do not behave like a monster truck at all. The center of gravity is far too high, making simple stunts like power wheelies and stoppies nearly impossible and bicycles and wheelies are clearly assisted by physics pushes. The trucks tend to turtle in rollovers because the tires are seemingly massless. This also affects the stability of the trucks doing things like jumps or drifting, and they roll over in very unnatural-looking ways with their big wheels behaving like they are filled with helium. They get stuck on their backs and hover in the air on their comically enormous and poorly placed bounding boxes.
The bounding box of the trucks when they contact the ground is different from the one used when two trucks collide. It is a cube that does not ascribe their actual shape so cyclone spins are a very jerky canned effect, and there is no gyroscopic effect from the wheels making the trucks extremely unstable in the air and prone to tumbling if you do not go off jumps perfectly straight. The modelling of 4WD is wrong and every truck regardless of its performance level has an open center differential, meaning that when the front end is up in the air as in a wheelie, the rear wheels do not spin, again making simple stunts that real monster trucks can do impossible. This also makes going around corners very skittish, as the truck has a tendency to spin when it lifts wheels in corners. Anyone who has problems spinning out in this game should not question their ability, the trucks just plain drive wrong. To me it feels like the default UE4 vehicle with silly huge tires and not a simulation of any monster truck.

I received this product through Humble Bundle and did not pay full price, but I still feel cheated, as the advertising claim of a "monster truck simulator" is wholly untrue and the developers should be ashamed. You could replace every truck in this game with a Polaris RZR and not have to change a thing. Monster Jam Steel Titans 2 is a physically far superior game that has a more accurate depiction of monster truck physics, and even the mobile game Monster Truck Destruction has superior suspension modelling. I can respect the level of gameplay detail the developers put into the game, as its caRPG elements, upgrades and tuning are perhaps the one place it shines over the other monster truck games available today, but it completely misses the mark with the one thing it overtly claims to do, while games that promise and deliver far less do it better.

I look forward to a sequel made by people who have actually seen a monster truck go around a turn and off a jump before deciding to make a game about them.

+Great physics and graphics, if you are familiar with the behavior of the CRD Monster Truck in BeamNG you will find little flaw in this, but it is Forza-esque "simcade" in that you have lots of assists on tap, making it easy to learn and hard to master.
+Responsive controls, advanced options for separate rear steering and manual transmission
+Decent wheel support, good FFB
+Fun variety of racing and stunt modes
+Great trick scoring and combo system
+Huge hub world and colorful graphics make it feel a bit like a '90s 3d platformer but you are a monster truck.

-Cannot reassign controls easily
-Missing effects like watersplashes
-Odd sticky collisions with other trucks
-Not all objects are breakable
-AI is very fast by itself but not smart enough to race other trucks very well making some events more challenging than they need to be
-Truck special abilities make the AI's inability to overtake worse
-Early game events are a boring slog (drag racing in a circle?), AI is quite strong, your truck starts out slow, and the races are short, but it picks up later
-Checkpoint races have overzealous cut protection and often just ruin your race resetting you before you even have a chance to return to the track

To configure the controls on a steering wheel, the only way I've found possible is finding UserWheelInput.ini in "AppData\Local\MJST2\Saved\Config\Windows" and manually changing the numbers minus one to reflect the button labels reported in the Windows Joystick control panel (0 = 1, 1 = 2, etc.).
Also, as a bonus, if you make a shortcut to MJST2-Win64-Shipping.exe and add the "-vr" command line option you can play with your SteamVR-compatible HMD. The menus and HUD are broken in this clearly unfinished mode but the meat of the game is still fully playable and lots of fun. Hope to see this as an official feature soon.

Overall a great budget racing game with surprisingly detailed physics. It does nothing really new or exciting aside from being one of the few games to have even vaguely realistic monster truck racing, and suffers a bit for it's lack of polish and direction. It's hard to tell whether it's for kids or the old veterans of the MSN Gaming Zone, but it is definitely all fun, and the inclusion of real life arenas along with the fantasy hub world means you can play pretty much however you like.

Excellent graphics. Super dense, lively city. Good gunplay and FPS mechanics. Beautiful audio work everywhere. A really nice soulful story with multiple endings.

But it's like half done. There's bits and pieces of barely functional setpieces in out of the way spots, and if you really go exploring you'll find all kinds of mysterious unused but curiously-detailed stuff, like someone was most of the way done making it all work and had to give up. In some spots it's honestly like playing an alpha of an early release title and then you literally walk around the corner and there's this amazing city with realistically flowing traffic, huge gaggles of pedestrians, and beaming neon streets that you just want to be a part of, if only you could get one of those Kabuki pork buns in your hand.

I really gotta rant though, the vehicle handling is simply atrocious.
The cars are all lovingly crafted and each have unique handling, lots of interior details and great sounds. You can pop the hoods and flash your brights. I love to cruise. The radio absolutely slaps. The lighting is juicy. But, driving in this game is a unique adventure where the the physics make no sense, the MPH speedo actually reads in KM/H and the traffic likes to stop dead on the freeway to read the advertisements. My favorite car is the Mizutani Shion, as it has a very unique auto-drifting handling style and it's wedge shape is excellent for driving under the gonks parked on the 101. However, something is really very wrong with the dynamics of the handling of every car, like someone who does not enjoy driving, or care about cars at all went in and tried to make it "easy" after the handling had been ironed out. The default way most cars' suspensions roll makes them wobbly and oversteery so everything that's supposed to help you control is fighting the physics. It's really hard to drive fast on anything but a bike, and the bikes too are severely hampered by their lack of the ability to wheelie. This additionally causes them to get easily stuck balanced on small ledges, as you cannot lean backwards or forwards to tilt the bike.
In my opinion all cars by default have WAY too much traction so they stick like glue and turn like slot cars, which makes even easy, slow FWD cars like Street Kid V's Archer Hella just behave in a totally wacky manner. This is offset by an extra function that makes the tires slide more (why????), this is in addition to a bunch of physics helpers that "should" keep the cars and bikes pointed where you want to go in mid-air but really just conflict with each other and make the cars more ludicrously unstable the faster you go, since that tends to involve becoming airborne. Though the fastest car in the game has a real top speed of only 137 mph, it seems to me the vehicle physics rate is too low to handle fast cars, even at the speeds you are limited to. Some of these things can be tweaked out and others are deeper in the game, and I have had a lot of fun playing with user.ini to make my game run better for hacking gonks from my window and playing a little bit of Carmageddon '77, at least until until MaxTac teleports into my glovebox and oneshots me with a spitball.

In the end i have to give a positive review, because from day one the game was very customizable and finding the magic settings for fast RTX and CPU-melting hordes of traffic and peds has given me more fun so far than the actual game. Just consider it a very expensive early access right now and sit on it. It's still really and truly fun enough that it won't be dropping off the map, but a game without pork buns is never a whole game.

Revising this review to reflect several hours of additional work to make this game operate properly.
It has very broken controller support and the default bindings conflict resulting in infinite burnouts. This can be fixed by manually rebinding all controls. While wheel support seems to work okay (even including support for motion rigs?!?!), if you have a Thrustmaster TH8A shifter connected, the game seems to think it is a wheel and will ignore your actual wheel until it is disconnected.

This is a criminally good video game with driving physics that are unfortunately an afterthought. The atmosphere is substantially different from the later Ghost NFS games and it has a more realistic feel, and a more detailed map that feels more lived-in despite the lower traffic density. The roads are tighter, there are cars parked everywhere, and there is less racetrack-like flow to the streets. The events are more varied than just racing or just drifting, and the handling tuning is far more in depth. The problem though is that the real gameplay, the act of driving a car, suffers completely, and there is this strange dissonance achieved by watching an realistic-looking automobile slide and crabwalk all over the road like I'm playing Burnout. People have been saying "what were they thinking" for 6 years now but really now, what were they thinking?!

Fortunately, there is a modding scene for these misbegotten Frostbite NFS games and it is completely possible to make cars that don't handle like perro caca both through the in-game tuning menu and playing around with Frosty Editor. If you like to tweak and tinker and don't care that the game is marginally less buggy than Street Legal Racing Redline, NFS2015 is worth buying, as is Payback. If you want a new NFS that's good right out of the box, buy Heat instead.