Game is brilliant in many ways - the cars feel better, more solid, react to knocks more realistically (seldom any wild spinning out of control), the AI is definitely much better than in GTS and it’s great not to be able to win easily (or at all), and don’t get me started on the weather and night-time effects - all superb.
BUT, and it’s a big but, certain things definitely make playing a frustrating experience, and if I feel this way four days in, I imagine in four weeks or months I’m gonna be really fed up.
1. The cafe menu system is/was pants. My kids aren’t even impressed. Being forced to collect certain sets of cars is just meh. It looks to me like these were the most unpopular cars in GTS. I just don’t want this clutter in my garage, I want to be the one who decides what to buy or try to win, and what to keep. I think we’re still missing menus 40-50 anyway (Gr2, Gr1, VGT, Classics/Nostalgia, maybe Lambo, McLaren, etc.)
2. It is weird, really weird, that as things stand it looks like we’re only going to be able to collect many cars as high-mileage secondhand models. We all get new, zero-mileage Mini Cooper 65, Sambabus and Beetle, 60s Corvette and Camaro, even WWII Jeep! BUT, we’ll never get a zero-mileage Mclaren F1 (road or race), CLKLM, 962, 787B, 330P4, 250GTO etc. Or the original 240Z and GT-R. That’s just mad.
3. The way we have to navigate around races is terrible, messy, confusing. They need an update with a simplified way of accessing races the ‘normal’ way (eg GTS). I want to be able to jump in a Ferrari, say, and just go do some Ferrari challenge races - having to jump around/find individual races at different tracks in three different time zones is just too time-consuming and unnecessarily over complicated.
As things stand, only 4 days in, I’m feeling I’d be happier if the better races/physics/weather had just been updated into GTS. Even GTS’s Brand Central was better with all the cars in one place.
Edit: they also missed a trick by not getting shot of a few unnecessary cars - why do we still have both the prototype and the real Lexus Gr3 car, why still the two near-identical Clios, why keep all the Gr3 road car versions (not based on real cars anyway, but at least ‘free’ in GTS, now they have to be bought), and now tuning is so good, what’s the point of most of the Gr4 cars at all, again, certainly the ones that never existed IRL?...
