Most of the routes are quite skinny too, which makes passing without contact a bit tricky but contributes to an excellent sense of speed. But stuff like this, combined with the incredibly realistic lighting, really helps make the tracks feel alive. The arcade nature has brought with it a forcefield of sorts that will ricochet you away from rocky verges, clumped snow, and protruding guard rails and prevents us from interacting much with anything beyond the asphalt. The attention to detail is truly admirable check out the plastic bags and Driveclub pamphlets wafting across the roads, and the multi-coloured butterflies doing the same thing. Postcard-perfect trackside vistas stretch for miles, but they’re just as capable of standing up to close scrutiny, from the individual stones in the road surface to the barely perceptible wiggle of a tautly stretched corner flag. As immaculately detailed as the cars are, I think Driveclub’s tracks are doubly breathtaking. Tracks in Scotland and Norway are joined by routes across Canada, India, and Chile. There’s not a great deal more to it than there is in the likes of, say, PGR4 – choose a gender and select from a bunch of preset heads and shirts – but it feels like a sensible touch giving us some elementary control over what we look like behind the wheel, whether we stand up to pee or not.Ī simple but welcome option, like PGR4 and TDU before it.Īt any rate, while the garage is almost entirely Euro-centric for now, its racing locations are much less so. You can turn all these elements off if you want, or just race in a factory colour, but even in single-player races you’re still going to find yourself pitted against a bunch of dorky-looking lime-green AI Ferraris covered in more stickers than a child’s bicycle.Īside from our cars, we’re afforded some basic driver avatar customisation, too. I find all three distracting and garish flaming eight-balls look pretty daft on the side of anything. It’s not a completely freeform livery editor like the one found in the Forza series, however it’s more like Grid Autosport, where you choose from a bunch of pre-set patterns, icons and numbers. Performance upgrades and tuning aren’t featured, although visual customisation is. But car lovers are nothing if not tribal, and this surprisingly insular day-one vehicle roster is going to rustle some jimmies. No doubt there’s some great stuff in Driveclub, including some properly amazing, lesser-known models that even the completely stacked Gran Turismo series is still omitting. More bafflingly, there are no Japanese cars at all. There’s actually only a single American car – the Hennessey Venom GT – and even that’s really just a Texas-built powerplant shipped over to the UK and manhandled into a modified Lotus Exige. It’s strange that the car list is so heavily biased towards European models, though almost exclusively so, in fact. They sound exceptional too Gran Turismo could learn a lot from this example. Even little touches like the custom door-opening sequences, tailored to the configuration of the exterior and interior door handles, go a long way in making these rides feel real in a way racing games rarely manage. Supercars like the Marussia B2 have fully functioning screens for their rear-facing cameras mounted in the centre console in lieu of a rear-view mirror, too, which developer Evolution captured exquisitely. They’re best enjoyed from inside the cabins, where the attention to detail is so extreme that even the windscreens show those subtle semi-circle scuffs on the glass you get from the wipers when the glare of the sun catches them. The biggest problem I had with it is that the handling’s too sticky to make the drift events much fun I generally found myself getting bogged down mid-corner because it’s surprisingly difficult to maintain momentum.ĭriveclub’s car selection is nicely curated to represent some of Europe’s most desirable sports cars, grand tourers, supercars and hypercars, plus a smattering of hot hatches as an entry point. I found it satisfying and entirely in line with Driveclub’s direction, even if it’s a fraction simplistic. Even if the back end does step out it generally only takes a smidge of countersteering to correct it. In keeping with the overall arcade sensibilities, even with a bootful of throttle Driveclub’s high-horsepower hypercars spring from the line with only moderate wheelspin, and they seem mostly reluctant to about-face mid-corner in an orgy of oversteer. The 50 cars in Driveclub brake hard and grip like glue, but the driving model is still nuanced enough to let you feel the difference between a bulky Bentley Continental GT and an eager John Cooper Works-tuned Mini. Handling trends towards the arcade side of the spectrum, yet it’s considerably less superficial than something like Burnout.
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