PROJECT CARS 2
A championship contender for PlayStation’s best racer
How do you make the hyperrealism that defines Slightly Mad Studios’ racing simulator exciting for people who think the barriers on tracks are there to help with turning? Whack in rallycross. A ferociously fast mix of track and dirt closecontact racing, rallycross sees you firing cars around corners raising two fingers to conservative wisdom, and praying that your tyres won’t wear out in the process. Our first taste of it is on the Daytona rallycross track. In theory, it’s a short and simple track to warm us up. Starting at the back of the pack, we’re using this run as a chance to get a feel for the weight of the RX Supercar Lite. As you’d expect, taming the car is half the battle, but just as we start to find our groove, a few sharp turns give way to a midrace jump that we take at the wrong angle, swirling off the track.
A sly restart while no-one’s looking, and our next lap is much better, with a satisfyingly twitchy back end that we fling out as we transition from dirt to tarmac on a corner. That also sees a visually impressive mix of dust billowing into the air and smoke belching out from the tyres. It’s a breathlessly entertaining introduction.
RALLY AROUND
Next up on our rallycross crash course is taking a Honda Civic GRC around Lånkebanen. It’s a much tougher track, a quarry filled with peaks, troughs, punishing corners, and other racers we can shunt out of the way. That penultimate hazard also means there are plenty of humiliating spinouts waiting for us, but it’s worth learning for the joy of nailing the perfect drift around the dusty first corner. Speed isn’t the issue here, maintaining control is, and this plays into Project Cars’ authenticity, which makes this race feel like Burnout but with the laws of reality, physics in particular, applied to it.
Slightly Mad Studios COO Rod Chong explains, “The style of driving is much more like how you drive a crazy arcade game. Because you’re pulling the handbrake, you’re sliding, you’re burning all four wheels, you’re going crazy, and entering the corners backwards. You have to drive like a madman to control these cars.”
BEACH PLEASE
We get to see more than just the rallycross in our hands-on. One demo puts us on the IndyCar city circuit in Long Beach – where we’re driving the clearly non-IndyCar Acura NSX GT3. The sharper-than-Wolverine’sclaws corners might be brutal, but the sense of speed is intoxicating when you’re flying down the final straight. Plus, this street circuit is the perfect showcase for the sound design, as it’s also hard not to love the eardrumruining roar of the engine as we accelerate under a bridge.
Our favourite race, though, is on the Red Bull Ring in Spielberg. Perhaps we’re just happy to see some greenery alongside the tracks for the first time in this playtest. It’s a five-minute session where we’re back in the Acura NSX GT3, and the smoother handling and long straights are the perfect antidotes to the bumpy mud tracks we raced on earlier. It’s more of a tense endurance race, as we discover when we take a corner too fast and recover by using an unfortunate AI driver as a buffer. We should really grab his insurance details.
The appeal of Project Cars stems from the way it’s been meticulously put together. Every single element is calibrated to feel like the real thing, which in turn leads to natural variety in how cars perform and races feel across the different disciplines. Rallycross adds yet another layer of variety to this, but it’s one that has a broader appeal than some of the different motorsports from the original (karting, we’re talking about you, not to you). Along with Dirt 4 (see p44) and GT Sport (p72), 2017 might be the best year yet for serious petrolheads on PlayStation 4.