Project Motor Racing Review: Missed the apex

It’s hard to beat the thrill of a well-executed qualifying lap. Stringing together a sequence of brave braking points and perfectly clipped apexes to shave mere fractions of a second off of your time, all while dancing on the limits of grip.

Many racing simulators have tried to harness that feeling, but few have really captured the magic of that experience. There’s a wealth of options available for the die-hard sim racer these days, but what’s really lacking – on PC at least – is a good and, crucially, approachable multiplayer experience.

Yes, many of the leading titles offer multiplayer, but they’re often just a handful of drop-in/drop-out servers and rely heavily on their communities to run leagues and race days rather than offering matchmaking. Then there’s iRacing, perhaps the king of multiplayer racing sims, but its monthly subscription fee keeps all but the most dedicated away.

Gran Turismo 7 never made its way to PC, and Forza Motorsport flopped pretty spectacularly – despite offering a robust multiplayer experience. All that being said, the market for a strong sim multiplayer sim experience is ripe for the picking, and that’s where Project Motor Racing comes in.

First off, let’s talk cars: Project Motor Racing has a healthy stable of 70 different vehicles spanning many different decades and racing series. For the history buffs, there’s the dominant Porsche 917K or the outrageous Mazda 787B, while fans of more modern machinery can feast on the wide (and frankly impressive) range of modern GT3 and LMDh offerings.

Visually, these cars are an absolute feast. Each feels meticulously crafted, both inside and out, and they look stunning whether you’re in the cockpit or staring at their bumper mid-race. The audio design is broadly top notch too, though not all of the cars feel quite as vibrant as they should.

While the cars may look stunning, the same unfortunately cannot be said for the tracks. Set across 18 locations, Project Motor Racing does feature a good range of circuits to thrash your way around – from American classic like Daytona or Lime Rock Park, to European mainstays like Spa or the Nürburgring and of course Mount Panorama – there’s certainly something here for everyone.

This is all let down though by the fact that the tracks just look… underwhelming. Instead of the modern visual feasts we’re used to, tracks in Project Motor Racing look like those in Assetto Corsa – a game launched 12 years ago, and not one known for its visual fidelity.

One of the big marketing points for Project Motor Racing is it’s multiplayer model: no subscriptions required for ranked races, no fees for custom lobbies. Sadly this wasn’t available for the review period, so instead I split my time across the single player modes – the “Survival-Style” career, the leaderboards, and of course the one-off race weekends.

One-off races and globally competitive leaderboards are certainly fun ways to get into a bit of racing action, but the unquestionable highlight of the single-player experience is the surprisingly enjoyable career mode. Rather than just being a suite of races like many others, instead you’re given a budget and some sponsor income and tasked with winning your way to success.

Cars cost money, as does entering a series and even the individual races themselves, and god forbid you crash and have to pay repairs out of your precious bank account. While not the most ground breaking of career modes, this approach to a single-player career is a novel one and much more interesting than the snooze-fest procession of races found in something like Gran Turismo 7.

Where Project Motor Racing really falls down, for me at least, is in the handling model. This is particularly disappointing, not just because it’s arguably the single most important aspect of a racing simulator but also because the developers so heavily stress the effort they’ve put into it. Sure, some cars felt agreeable, but overall most of them were messy and unpredictable.

Too often I found that the default setup for a car wasn’t to be trusted. Cars would regularly have their rear ends go light under braking, occasionally even snapping around, and then they’d be loose on exit when trying to get the power down. I’ve spent a lot of hours lapping Bathurst in an Aston Martin GT3 car in Assetto Corsa Competizione, achieving some respectable lap times, but when matching the same track and car combination in Project Motor Racing it was like it was my first day driving ever.

I’m sure that the developers expect players to tweak and tinker with the setup to match the track and their driving style, but the reality is that not every player is a setup nerd. It’s crucial for the track and car combinations to have default setups that are at least driveable for a sim to achieve wide scale success.

Perhaps worst of all was the fact that many of the cars just felt… samey. Some cars definitely stood out, but generally within a class they were all an indistinct mess. In many ways this reminded me of the first 2 entries in the Project Cars franchise. Both of those games had a couple of cars that were put together perfectly, but the rest were just indistinct grey blobs rather than being true representations of their real-life counterparts.

Overall, Project Motor Racing just doesn’t quite reach what’s promised. A strong and visually impressive catalogue of cars and tracks is countered by poor default setups and samey handling. There’s definitely some good here – the career mode offering is robust and the competitive leaderboards are a nice addition – but they’re ultimately overshadowed by, well, everything else.

What was an opportunity to standout in an ever-growing field of sim racing competitors has sadly fallen by the wayside. There’s still a chance for Project Motor Racing to shine though, and success will hinge on just how good the online multiplayer ends up being.

Project Motor Racing was reviewed using a promotional code on Windows PC via Steam, as provided by the publisher. Click here to learn more about Stevivor’s scoring scale.