Project Cars 3 Review - A Racing Franchise Heading in the Right Direction

Written by Stephen Varner  on August 31, 2020

Reviews: A bit of a mixed bag but the franchise is headed in the right direction making it a bit more accessible for everyone.

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With the newest installment to the franchise Slightly Mad Studios seems willing to try and take what is now their third game in the series in a little bit of a different direction. The game has been given a major facelift with a brand-new career mode, a new approach to online racing and its most diverse set of cars yet.

I recall one of my personal gripes with the previous Project Cars games was one of the UI and menu systems. While it’s true you could customize a huge amount of granular details and systems within its labyrinthine set of menus, the act of navigating it all could at times prove frustrating. That’s all been thrown out in favor of a more simplified, elegant and inviting design that is just intuitive from the start. This is punctuated by the new driver system that helps players set the assists and difficulty to match their personal experience and skill. Right from the start you get the sense that this is an experience that's been built to appeal to a broader range of players rather than be super focused on just the hardcore sim folks. So where does it leave them exactly? I think the answer is probably going to be a bit of a mixed bag.



I’m not usually much for racing online but the way the racing license system is worked into Online lobbies and scheduled events is a really good way to immediately get a sense of who you might want to avoid on the track, and hopefully as the matchmaking shakes itself out it will become the primary way racers are grouped together. The primary goal of the concept is to give everybody a lettered safety rating that will show other players whether you respect other drivers or recklessly crash into your opponents in the first few turns of the race. In my time online I was almost as preoccupied with increasing my safety rating as I was with trying to win. My other favorite system is the scheduled events mode which takes the race weekend experience and condenses it into about an hour or less. You’ll start by picking one of the upcoming events from the menu and get dumped into a qualifying session where you’ll have to earn your spot on the track. For my first try with this mode I was thrilled to take 2P only to lose 3 places in the race proper because…well, those drivers were simply better than me. It’s a great way to incorporate the unique competitive aspects of motorsport and make it a digestible online experience. If you prefer to just jump right into a random race though there’s of course a quick play option as well as a Rivals or Breakout mode if chasing top scores is your thing.

The career mode has been simplified and streamlined to make for generally shorter races and challenges. That's not to say it's without depth. Every event has an optional set of three challenges that will feed into the XP system and help to unlock subsequent events more quickly. If you can’t be bothered to chase them however you can always use some of your hard-earned credits to unlock the next set of events and progress further without having to perfect each event. Most of these are reasonable though and many will unlock with skilled play. Some will have you attempting to make a certain number of clean overtakes within a specific time frame while others might challenge you to set a blazing fast lap time on your way to victory. It helps encourage replay of completed events and feeds into the track mastery system. Every location will keep track of how many of its corners you’ve mastered, and you’ll get further experience from nailing the racing line and mastering the track. Even the process of learning where the racing line and apex should be has been changed in a way that I think might encourage players to associate their brake and turn in lines with the environment rather than the colored markers you might be used to seeing in racing games with a realistic handling model. They do this with floating markers with three distinct meanings. One that indicates where you ought to start braking, one to indicate the apex and one to show where your turn should end. I found that it helps keep your eyes up and, on the environment, rather than down on the pavement timing your actions to the color changes. All these assists can be turned off of course and you can play without the turn indicators, stability management or anything else if you prefer as I do.



This leads me to the reworked handling model for this game. It’s been rebuilt with much more consideration for a gamepad and it’s one of the things I like best about the game. It can be tough to articulate the difference in racing games that feel sticky and grounded rather than floaty and disconnected from the tarmac. Much of it comes down to the physical feedback you can feel in the controller you’re using. If you have a great steering wheel with solid force feedback you know exactly what I mean, but that can hardly be translated effectively to a standard controller. Visual cues help but getting the proper amount of rumble in the right place so that you can sense where your grip is starting to give is critical if you’ve got few or no assists on and want to push the car to its limits. This is an area I think Project Cars gets right and even makes great use of the feedback triggers in the Xbox One version of the game. If you’ve played any of the Forza games or any one of a number of Codemasters’ excellent racers on the platform, you’ll understand what I mean. It’s a small thing that often gets overlooked but goes a long way to making you feel like you’re on the pavement rather than floating over it.

When it comes to visuals, I’m sorry to say that this is where I am probably the most critical of the game. It’s not a bad looking game necessarily but some of the environments and especially the lighting just looks a little flat in 2020. I’ve tried both the performance and resolution modes that are available on the Xbox One X and neither is without compromise. I noticed a great deal of screen tearing and a fair amount of texture pop in and the dynamic resolution can often create an uneven visual quality across the board. It’s not a bad looking game by any means as the dynamic weather and varied locations give you a great variety of things to look at, I just wish it was a little more polished up to deliver it with a steadier image quality.



Project Cars 3 is a total rework for the franchise and leans a little less sim and a little more game and I think it’s absolutely the right move to bring a wider group of people to a game series that has been difficult to approach at times. The restructured career gives a much cleaner through line of where you should focus your efforts and the ability to own and customize cars provides a better sense of investment and progression. The option is still there to set up long endurance races with whatever weather settings you want but offloads enough of the granular management of play to create a more inviting and streamlined experience. The online structure is a standout and I hope more racing games piggyback off the easy to understand feedback of the Racing License feature going forward.