This weekend I spent a little time with Race Pro, the new driver from Atari. While most of the guys in the Cult of Sun Tzu (my clan) have begun to rave about it, especially our Lethal friend, I'm a bit more reserved in my judgment. Still, it's a very good game.
Now
the Lethal One keeps telling us that this is the perfect driver if you
have the Microsoft Wheel. I do, and I don't ever use it because i have
no good rig for the thing. So it's somewhere in the garage.
Nevertheless, I'm good enough on the controller, or at least I think
that I am, to place after i get the gist of the game. The problem is, I
haven't unlocked enough of the autos to tell you. But now that I just
got my hands on the racing Viper, I'm starting to be convinced that
this is more excellent than it seems.
Race Pro is, quite
frankly a combination of PGR, TOCA and Forza. So far it's a pretty
decent mix for the kinds of things I like. The TOCA part is that you
have a real season and you have to earn money to get into races. It's
kinda realistic, but nowhere near as fun and interactive as Grid. And
it should be said that this is a $40 game, not a $60 one, so it's a
decent budget game. Like Forza you can hack you ride and tune the
handling. But it's all about handling which is better and more
realistics for tight class-based racing. Sure it's cool to put a 800hp
blown hemi into a Mini Cooper, but... Like PGR the driving can be
nicely forgiving and the online competition is handled nicely.
Race
Pro is unique in several ways, some good. My first gripe is that there
is no E-brake. WTF. I get realism but jeez. On the plus side, the
tuning of the suspension and all that makes a significant difference,
and I actually get it. I changed my differential settings and I noticed
the difference right away. I changed my spring softness and got 5
seconds off my lap time. So I can make all of the different cars handle
the way I like them to handle. I think I'm going to learn a lot more
about tire camber setups and all that and use them in Race Pro more
than I ever bothered in Forza.
I don't like the fact
that so far I can't change the look of my hoop. All of them are pretty
ugly and realistic. I also think that they should have had multiple
grains of heads up. It's either extremely busy and distracting or not
there at all. I like the grains of the assistance and driver aids
better than in Forza. The track line is not interactive and therefore
not helpful as Forza's is, but the shift indicator for what gear you
should be in is very nice. The in-car view has fairly readable dash, so
on certain open wheel cars, it makes up for the lack of heads up.
The
tracks of Race Pro are very good. There are a few that are familiar,
Road America, Valencia, Laguna Seca and Macau and several new ones that
are nice challenges. There's not much detail paid to graphic niceties -
spectators are few and wooden; trees and landscaping might as well be
from the PGR 1 days. I wouldn't be surprised to see jaggies. But the
tracks themselves are first rate, technical and well realized. So far
my favorite is Brands Hatch, and Pau is giving me conniptions.
The
AIs in this game are brutal. If you hookup to Pro mode, as opposed to
Semi-Pro or Rookie, be prepared to get your car flipped. There are some
vicious algorithms underneath some of these guys. Also, if you cut the
track, you get DQ'd. That's right. I haven't played many online
sessions in open rooms, but there is no turning off collisions and
other goodies for button mashers.
This is a serious
driver's game and it shows. Still, the balance is that it's as
technical as any drving game needs to be but forgiving enough on Rookie
settings to be a lot of fun. The tracks are interesting enough to
provide a good variety of racing conditions. Right now, however,
qualifying and unlocking vehicles is likely to try the patience of most
workaday gamers. This is a drivers game, not with bells and whistles
but with cranks, knobs and switches.
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