Project CARS 3 is a Racing Dumpster Fire - Busy Gamer Review & 100 Subs!.
Project Cars 3 takes all the good things you loved about Project Cars 2 and lights them on fire. The feel, the controls, the fact that it was a quality racing sim… all buried and burning under the pile of garbage that is this game. We’re not going to be subtle in this one.
Let’s break down this flaming, hot dumpster fire in our Busy Gamer Review of Project Cars 3. Welcome back to No Time Gamer. The channel helping your gaming sessions be time well spent. Project Cars 3 is the third installment in the sim racing series created by Slightly Mad Studios.
We’re calling BS on this being a racing sim, but we will review it as such because that is what the creators have repetitively said it is. FYI Throughout the video, all first-person gameplay was made using a racing wheel while all third person action was made with a controller.
Let's start with how the game feels, because that is everything in a racing game. Even with repeatedly tweaking the settings, it was impossible to get the game to feel good with a wheel or controller. Force feedback on the wheel was so bad that I launched Assetto Corsa and reinstalled my wheel software just to see if my device was broken.
Even after boosting the force feedback settings, my wheel never felt close to relaying the proper tactile information. Switching to a controller made the game playable but not great. And no matter what I did, cars never felt like they had any traction.
They would slip and slide in every corner like it was intended to be a drifting game. Even high downforce cars like the LMPs lose grip and start to glide around corners where they are expected to stick to the ground. And any time you drive over curbs you flip a coin on whether you will completely spin out or not.
It’s probably better off just avoiding them whenever possible. It also doesn't help that the game fails to deliver a good sense of speed leading to locked brakes and awful understeering in many corners. This also could be caused by the overwhelmingly bad heads up display.
The HUD is cluttered with information meant to assist beginner drivers and track your XP earned while racing. The top of the screen pumps out alerts congratulating you for well taken corners, or that you passed a car,… because how would you know you passed a car otherwise.
The bottom left of the screen houses the ugliest minimap in gaming history and the game has subtitles on by Default. Subtitles… in a racing game... While you race. On top of all of that, the screen glows red when you impact either another car or a wall with too much force.
Again, how else would you know? This poor design carries into the menus as well, with car and track selections being endless scrollbars that make finding what you want a constant time-wasting hassle. Continuing with other unwelcome changes, pit stops and the pit lane were removed from the game completely.
This means that there are no more custom “race weekends.” Its no longer possible to start from pit lane in practice, tune your car, and then do some qualifying laps to earn your starting position. Your options are to race with A.I. or do laps by yourself in practice.
Furthermore, all performance-impacting damage is removed, which eliminates any penalty for risky passes or taking a corner too fast. Also, If the skies dump buckets of rain or the time of day changes, your tires automatically adjust to the best pressure, temperature, and compound for the conditions.
And if you do run wide, expect your car to be automatically slowed down and ghosted. The class system also makes no sense. It seems like the developers decided that cars that look close to each other are in the same class. GT4, GT3, and GTE are all in the same “GT A” class, so you have the Corvette CR8, Dodge Challenger, V8 SuperCars, and Audi R8s all racing together when none of those cars would race in the same class in real life.
Most of the cars and tracks are just brought over from Project Cars 2 with Rallycross, karts, and their tracks replaced by Formula E and Super Trucks, but the new series don't have any tracks specifically made for them. All rallycross tracks were removed from the last game - even the tracks that were variants of existing courses like Catalunya and Daytona.
As an additional stab in the heart, Spa, Sebring, and Le Mans, three major international circuits, are absent from this title. On the bright side, we have ham-fisted street circuits based in China and Cuba to make up for it. We aren’t done yet my friends.
The A.I. drivers are not fun to race against. They seem to either slow down to an unrealistic speed or go full speed through corners like mystical racing wizards. And they never seem to separate from each other after the first lap, so It’s like each car is driving on the same racing line in perfect harmony.
The A.I drivers also don’t have realistic gearboxes while accelerating down long straightaways, so you’ll get left in their dust. And after all these core gameplay critiques, we still didn't dive into the campaign mode, which, as expected, is just a worse version of the previous game loaded with buyable upgrades that let you race cars in classes where they don’t belong.
Multiplayer is revamped to have better matchmaking but by the time this review is released, I'm sure there will not be many people left playing so it's not worth talking about. Finally,.. thank God, we usually don't dive too deep into graphics, but this looks like a mobile game, even on max settings on a quality pc.
And the sounds are bland and basic compared to other games released in recent years. Project Cars 2 was by no means a perfect sim racing game, but it had moments of brilliance. Project Cars 3 is nothing more than a cash grab pile of flaming trash or, at best, a cheap Forza Motorsport knockoff, your time would be better spent getting the previous entry in the series on the cheap.
