What’s on this week
It took a full day to download Assetto Corsa Competizione on Autosport’s under-utilised Xbox One, so there was a great deal of anticipation when at last it was ready to start. Boy was it worth it.
The official release of the GT World Challenge Series, newly out on consoles having been introduced to PC gamers in 2018, is an anorak’s dream. It’s everything that, as a teenager who spent many an hour with a controller in-hand, Autosport had imagined in a racing game playable from the sofa. The engine notes and gearchanges of each car – with all GT3 marques from 2018 and 2019 represented – are exquisitely accurate.
“The noise of the shifting, the pop of the gearchange is identical to how we have it in the GT3 cars,” agrees four-time British GT champion Jonny Adam, whose Garage59 Aston Martin Vantage features in the game. “The Vantage felt very similar with the noise, the chassis balance, the tyre grip, the aero balance.
I think they did a fantastic job of getting it as realistic as possible.”
Satisfaction also comes from the attention to detail applied to the in-cockpit features, with different data read-outs on the steering wheel of each car.
It’s incredibly niche – there aren’t too many games where you can attempt to recreate Adrian Zaugg’s Zandvoort A1GP mastery in an Emil Frey Jaguar – but that’s a key part of its charm. For the record, in a randomised grid Autosport started 12th and rose as high as ninth before clobbering the inside kerb at Turn 2, which put the Jag hard into the barriers on the outside and caused major damage.
But Zandvoort isn’t the only track on the game where abusing the kerbs can throw you off in a split second. Laguna Seca is especially savage at the fast left-hander before the Corkscrew and, by contrast, it’s the almost totally flat kerbs at Misano that can easily lull you into a false sense of security and invite you to run wide, invalidating the lap.
There isn’t a huge selection of tracks if you don’t have the Intercontinental GT Challenge pack – which also includes Bathurst, Kyalami and Suzuka – but there’s enough to ensure variety and it makes a nice change to learn tracks such as Zolder, which rarely features in casual racing titles.
All are satisfying when you do manage to get it right at something close to the limit – banging down a gear at 130R or Pouhon before powering back on the throttle, threading the needle between the walls on the downhill stretch at Mount Panorama, and taking a deep breath as you ride the crest at Brands Hatch’s Sheene Curve, desperately hoping you’ll have enough road on the exit.
You can feel that the cars are heavy when trying to do a quick change of direction, for example through the first chicane at Monza, but that’s part of the challenge you have to work with in order to achieve a half-decent lap time.
One disappointment is that you can only race against 19 other cars – ‘only’, as the smallest grid for a GTWCE race was 46, and 72 started the Spa 24 Hours – but fortunately the AI is excellent.
Autosport hasn’t yet managed enough game time to get a sense for the various cars’ differing handling
characteristics, but found the rear-engined Porsche especially tail-happy in the night at Spa when tyre temperatures were down.
ACC will gain a GT4 pack this summer, which will further increase the niche appeal and improve the level of depth still further, with the likes of the KTM X-bow and Alpine A110 GT4 set to be added to the ranks of Audi, BMW, Mercedes et al.
The ultra-realistic noise – Autosport has frequently been asked to turn the volume down at the risk of waking the sleeping baby – and the challenge of mastering the tracks will keep players coming back for short bursts time and again. Assetto Corsa Competizione is available to play on Xbox One, Playstation 4 and PC.