Project Cars 3
Trying to be all racing games at once.
It’s harsh to call anything a sell-out, but Project Cars 3 truly feels like it’s abandoned its own principles in search of the mass market. At its heart, this is still a serious racing game where you must brake properly for corners, drive on the correct racing line and avoid unsettling the car through overzealous steering or dubious flapping of the gas pedal. But with so many more sim racers around since the first Project Cars came out in 2015, simply rehashing the usual in-depth motorsport career isn’t going to win any new fans. And so we find Project Cars 2 dressed up in Asphalt 9’ s clothes, acting like Forza Motorsport 7 and borrowing GT Sport’s online mode. It’s a reinvention of Taylor Swift proportions and so pronounced, even its fans may not recognise it. Project Cars 3 isn’t trying to be one racing game - it’s trying to be all of them.
The previous race day busywork and tinkering have been stripped away, replaced with the Forza Motorsport school of career mode, where you take place in themed events, all tiered from beginner races to exotic supercar series, with the option of buying and upgrading eligible cars along the way. The usual long-haul, grassroots championships complete with practice laps and qualifying are simply gone, replaced with breathless, quick-fire races, each with three criteria to check off in order to progress. These criteria are now much more varied than the pure ‘win the race’ ethos of old, for instance asking you to hit a target top speed or master 30 corners in one race. This adds welcome gameplay variety for skilled drivers while also giving those who aren’t so great at racing games a way to proceed without having to win all the time. But it’s also gamey. Very, very gamey.
Project Cars 3 is a great way to get into sim racing for newcomers thanks to its overtly gamey career mode, but the move into proper ‘simcade’ territory feels odd and unfulfilling.
Justin Towell