My ramblings following a few days with the PS4 version of Assetto Corsa with the day 1 patch in place.
Reviewed using my rig, which at the time of writing is a Playseat Challenge, Thrustmaster T150, TP3A and TH8A.
It doesn't cover the on-line, which I will write up separately.
UI and Navigation.
On firing up AC for the first time you are greeted with an excellent intro video that sets the scene nicely and gets you fired up for what's to come (or reaching for the volume control if its midnight as it was for me - best not wake the family).
The main menu and interface is nice and clean, easy to navigate and user friendly. All the usual suspects are in place, with Special Events, Drive and Career taking up the bulk of the screen; below that three smaller sections for News, Replays and Options.
Special Events consist of a massive variety of different Time Attack, Drift and Races that mix and match the car and track combinations up nicely. It’s a great idea for when you can't make up your mind what to do. A special mention for me goes to one event in particular, the very last Special Event is Brands Hatch Indy and a full grip of old school Abarth 500's, it's simultaneously hilarious fun, a real challenge and a great demonstration of the depth of the physics engine. What makes it special is that it does so using arguably the simplest track layout in the title and the least powerful car.
Drive is your sandpit, allowing you to pick from a vast array of event types, from Free Run to Race Weekend, via the likes of Drift, On-Line and Time Attack. Long term this is likely to eat up the bulk of your time, so fittingly it’s the default selection when you fire up AC. Nothing is locked away in Drive either, you have access to the entire car roster and track list, no need to unlock anything.
Career takes you through a series of themed Time Attacks and Races, starting with lower powered front wheel drive cars and building up as it goes. It’s a nice idea that introduces you the different challenges faced with the different drivetrains and just how different road and race cars are on track. As with the Special Events this throws up some nice combinations of cars and tracks at you, I in particular loved a Time Attack at Imola with the KTM X-bow, the car and track suiting each other excellently.
All is however not a bed of roses within the Career mode, or for that matter any 'race' based mode, AC gives you four AI levels, from Easy to Alien. Now I'm not the quickest driver around, but I'm certainly not the slowest and yet the pace the AI has even on Easy is at time absurd. This has the potential effect of seriously putting off a lot of players new to racing titles, and given that another three difficultly levels exist, it's also un-needed. Add in that some of the career events seem designed to be overly difficult even at the Easy level and you have some quite serious balancing issues to content with.
The News section only currently contains some very basic information on how to get started, it's not massively helpful and only time will tell how much love it will get and consequently how much use it will be to us.
Next up we have the Reply tool, which I was pleased to see was nice and easy to find, not hidden away behind some odd part of career as other titles have done. So I was particularly annoyed to find that a limit is set on the size of the replay! I do also mean size, as its not number of lap or time dependent, as it varies depending on track size and number of cars on track. This makes it almost impossible to judge what you will end up with on a replay and as a result very disappointing. I put a lot of videos together across all the titles I run, and this is the first on the current generation that I have found to have a cap on the length of the recording. Given that with PS4 Firmware 4.0 (I'm running it as a Beta right now) you can record up to 60 minutes of gameplay, limiting a reply to circa 6 minutes is absurd.
The last bit is the options side of things, which in all honesty for a title that migrated from PC are very, very basic. Units can be converted, but only for speed, what about every other unit used in set-up screens! Regardless of if you are using a controller or a wheel you can't re-assign a single button, which makes button box support for wheel users a non-starter and is simply unacceptable for pad users. To effectively use a pad with a sim you need to be able to set it up for your personal preference, this is simply not good enough and needs to be patched quickly.
Wheel users will find a surprising lack of options, with no wheel or pedal calibration and minimal Force Feedback Options. The lack of calibration will mainly affect the brake pedal, and by default is very sensitive, with many cars locking up at half travel on my TP3A's. I was able to fix that by adjusting the brake mod on the actual pedal, but this will not be an option for many. The limited Force Feedback options are a welcome sight for many (based on the 'other' sim release on PS4), but once again are not explained to those who are unfamiliar with them. Out of the box they work well, however I would recommend dialling down the Main Force Feedback (first option) and switching on the Understeer Effect, as without doing so the wheel may end up clipping and you will not have the loss of Self Aligning Torque when understeering that you should have (if I'm being picky Understeer Effect should also be a slider, not just an on/off option).
One thing that currently is a real pain for user of the Thrustmaster T8SA H pattern shifter is that currently it will not work if its plugged into the wheel base (as it does with every other PS4 racing title), but rather has to be plugged into the second USB port. This is something that appears to be a carryover from the PC version and is the only PS4 title that I am aware of that forces you down this route. Its quite annoying given that I now have to mess around with cables when moving between titles just to get my shifter working.
Graphics and Sound (OK so how pretty is it on the eyes and ears)
The car models are well done, nicely detailed both inside and outside with full working instrument clusters and the drivers movements well animated (however the speed of gear change is bizarrely quick when using a stick), based on the cars I've sampled to date they are also very accurate models
The tracks however are a very mixed bunch, the immediate track you are on is OK, but as you get further away from the track the trackside furniture and landscape get more and more basic. It's been a while since I've seen 2D static crowds in a racing title, but here they are. It's not a big deal for me personally (hell I love Seb Loeb Rally and that's one of the worse looking sims around) as its consistent and the bits immediately in front of you are fine. They do however as a result seriously lack atmosphere, the focus in getting the laser scanned detail has clearly taken precedent over every other aspect of the track build.
What is not quite so fine it that you get a bit of pop-up in the distance, which is a pain when attempting to read the track ahead, and a fair degree of screen tearing as well. Now both of these can be quite distracting, the degree to which will vary from person to person and it does need to be resolved.
It also falls foul of some very odd design choices, with you just being dropped into the car on the grid as soon as you hit the race start button, most titles attempt to build some atmosphere at this point, but with AC is clinically straight into the race. The end of the race is no different, with no clear indication the race has even finished bar the chequered flag in the top left corner of the screen. You carry on driving for a few hundred meters and then get teleported back to the pits, at this point it's not clear what is happening and easy to leave the screen. Doing so will however lose all progress and the hard work you have put in will be forgotten. You have to wait for however long it takes for an unknown percentage of the rest of the field to finish and teleport back into the pits before you get the results screen and can safely leave the race!
Its origin as a PC title also show in one other area, the set-up screens for the car while you are in the pits. Its small white text on a picture background, I sit around 1.5 metres (under six foot) from a 50" screen in my rig and I still struggle to read it.
Audio is also excellently recreated, from the engine note, timbre and 'feel' of the sound (I run a 5.1 AV system for my rig) are all right. In addition you get some nice atmospheric sounds as well, from the wind noise, to stones in the wheel arches to front splitter scraping the ground under braking. It all adds up to a package that sonically works.
Odd gripes sound wise are that the menu music randomly picks a speaker on my AV system to use every time I change screen, not too bad if it’s the centre speaker, annoying and odd if it's one of the rear speakers (and it will only be one) and when you look left or right the audio crackles and cuts out, it doesn't happen in all cars, but I found it consistent in the Alfa Romeo GTA and Ford Escort RS1600.
Driving Feel, Physics and AI (the important stuff).
Let me get this out of the way nice and quickly. The feel of the track and of driving is sublime, it really is as good as I have ever felt in a sim and its backed up with a physics engine that manages to 'do the double'. What I mean by that is when you get a title that mixes road and race cars, the feel and physics of one normally suffers (mainly down to which side of the tyre model they focus on), here they have nailed both.
The road cars feel like a road car should on track, with lots of understeer to manage, but importantly you can manage it, with lifting off the throttle a little and unwinding the steering a little taming it. Lift off heavily and if the car should you will get lift off oversteer, be in from the Yellowbird or an old school Abarth 500. They are more trickery to position on the track, dive more under braking and more likely to get unsettled if you're not smooth with all your inputs.
Race cars on the other hand give you huge amounts of grip, be it mechanical or aero and as such allow you much more freedom to attack the track, the challenge being how much of the track you can exploit. Don't get me wrong the race cars can and will still bite, and when they do they are going much faster and with much greater forces at play. As such they will do so quicker and with much more damaging results, this is particularly true for the older race cars in the roster.
A comment in an article in this month's Evo magazine sums it up well, and that is with a road car on a track you drive to the limits of the car, with a race car on the track you drive to the limits of the track. This for me sums up the difference that AC manages to capture excellently.
Overall everything about the physics engine and the force feedback is doing exactly what I would expect it to, and as a result you can fall into the wonderful cycle of just you, a car and a track; which results in hours of hot lapping for the sake of it. It's become a bit of a cliché around AC on the PC, but it is one because its the reality of it. One of the nice things about both the Special Events and Career is that it throws combinations at you that you might not pick, yet you still find this 'click' takes place and it’s a wonderful thing.
Now that's not to say that everything is perfect, with my T150 I get an insane amount of 'rumble' from the wheel when waiting in the grid for the start of the race, or waiting to leave the pits for a free run. It's not consistent, but it happens around 80% of the time and not only is it hugely distracting, but I quite certain it's not doing my wheel any good at all. The firmware on the wheel is up to date and this is the only title I own to do it. Once you start moving it then disappears.
Damage also needs to get a mention, its scalable between 0% and 100%, and has both a cosmetic and mechanical effect, at the top end clipping the barrier in an open wheel car is race ending, and missed and miss timed shifts will damage the drivetrain. Contact with other cars also feels solid and with substance, as such damage adds to the package in a meaningful way, which is good to find as it too often feels like a tacked on extra in titles.
Finally the AI, which I initially found to be a pleasant surprise, being both challenging and quick, with not a hint of rubber-banding at all. They will challenged me, they made mistakes, etc. All of it however felt organic and real, as long as you stick to smaller grids, road cars and the slower race cars. As soon as I moved to track cars or race cars the additional speed and corner speed seems to throw the AI a massive curve ball and its gets more interested in its own line and I found unneeded contact from the AI, to the point of being repeatedly driven into from behind in a GT3 race. As such the AI's situational awareness does seem to be very hit and miss, and combined with the AI's speed even at the lowest difficulty level it makes for very frustrating races.
I have however also found some odd behaviour from the AI as well, in one race I was running in forth and was gifted a second place finish when on the penultimate lap three AI cars pitted (two from ahead of me and one from behind), this phenomenon is not isolated either, as I have found it occurring in races in every mode.
Overall
It's far from perfect and has its oddities and glitches (all of which can and should be patched out), but the core of what it sets out to do, which is offer one of the best physics engines around, with the feel and detail you would expect from laser scanned tracks to provide a driving experience which is simply immersive it manages.
While it sounds easy to do, and many have claimed they have managed it in the past this is (for me) the first time it's been managed across road and race cars, of all drivetrain types in a single title.
What they have it seems totally forgotten to do is actually add a game in with it, quite simply it’s a superb physics engine in an unpolished, unfinished package that at times seems designed specifically to frustrate. I do hope that they put the work in to turn this around, as the core of it has so much potential that it does deserve it.
Personally I'm going to stick with it, as I'm happy with hop-lapping with it and am interested to see how it develops; I can get my 'racing needs' with other titles. However, and I suspect I will get a good degree of grief for this, as it stands right now as a package it would be very hard for me to recommend it to anyone looking for a racing experience.
