Recent reviews by Raufbold

I waited for a long time to buy this game. I even missed a few sales wary that it would still be not worth the money. Now I purchased the Premium at 50% off. Was it worth the money? Well, kind of (at 50% off).
Let's say that it probably is not as terrible as all the negative reviews seem to show. Not deserving the title of the 'ultimate racing game' either though.

Let's get the bad stuff out of the way first:

<<<THE BAD>>>
- The game hardly looks significantly better than Motorsport 7, yet requires waaaay more VRAM to look decent (believe me, you don't want to see the Medium quality car models of Medium quality track textures - that's like a trip to mid 2000's). This is probably one of the biggest problems I have with this game so far
- Every time I launch the game, it just HAS to show me the 'VRAM over budget" message, and do it DURING MY FIRST RACE WITHOUT PAUSING THE GAME!!!! Who came up with this idiotic idea? I have to either rewind or restart
- Game still has glitches - I wasn't able to proceed after my Rival event - game was just stuck on the finishing screen
- Fewer cars overall compared to Motorsport 7 and pretty much all the non-sports cars were removed (all the more tame 'everyday' cars and SUVs are not in the game)
- Lack of any Motorsport events in the single player campaign. For a game that has Motorsport in the title this is kind of lackluster
- Single player custom events still don't allow to create own championships and assign specific cars to drivatars. I mean, how hard can it be? And it would add so much to the replayability...

These are probably my biggest complaints.

Now for the good stuff (and there is a lot of it too):

<<<THE GOOD>>>
- car selection is still really good and almost everything that needs to be there is there
- no more 'Formula E' syndrom of Motorsport 7 (where there were 12 cars with different names and liveries, but essentially all were exactly the same). It also was true for NASCAR and a few other classes. No more of that crap in this game
- nice selection of tracks - Maple Valley, Nurburgring, Suzuka, Circuit de Catalunya and many more
- driving physics feel pretty good
- nice attention to detail - for example when I change transmission to race, you start hearing the whine of a sequential
- drivatars are actually ok. Yes, they can bump into you when the track is crowded, but that behaviour is similar to what you would encounter in online racing. Otherwise they are decent
- car XP progression was fixed and now feels quite organic and achievable. You get points per level that you can spend on anything. With max car level of 50, I was able to level up a car to lvl 25 over the course of only 6 campaign races
- haven't played much online, but what I did felt good. Penalty system is overall quite fair and usually punishes those at fault and if the behaviour was really careless or malicious
- big one - despite settings showing 50% above VRAM budget, I haven't yet experienced any FPS drops, so overall the optimization is probably better than it seems to be

Can't believe this gem has finally been released! Having played this game in beta for so long, and it is an amazing game. While campaign is a nice addition, I feel like the biggest strengths of this game are competitive multiplayer and sandbox. Being relatively easy to mod, it allows your imagination to run wild and build all kinds of ships, then battle them. I managed to create fighters and star destroyers from Star Wars, cruisers, frigates and enormous juggernauts - all comprised of hundreds of vital modules which are completely destructible. Creative value of the game is pretty much endless. Definitely recommended

I absolutely love these kind of sandbox games. Lots of content, immense abilities for customization and creating your own stories. Haven't had that much fun with a game since the World of Mixed Martial Arts. And I'm not a football fan AT ALL!

This is a truly amazing game, lovingly made by a very dedicated team who listen to players and continuously develop new features and adding content. And you can play hotseat games with friends (Battletech - I'm looking at you there, please learn from these guys).
Anyway, highly addictive game which is a lot of fun. Definitely my new favourite.