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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