Project Motor Racing PC Review
Summary: Project Motor Racing heralds the return of Ian Bell and co. It retains the visuals and impressive physics of previous games while changing things up with a new career mode.
3.6
Untapped Potential
When EA acquired Slightly Mad Studios through its Codemasters acquisition in 2021, I was filled with a deep sense of foreboding. Sure enough, a year or so later, SMS’s flagship series, Project CARS, had been canned. While the studio technically still exists, nothing has been seen or heard of them in 2021.
Around this time, studio founder Ian Bell left the company to form a new studio, Straight4. Project Motor Racing is the first release by Straight4, the unofficial Project CARS 4.
Be forewarned, I’m going to be comparing Project Motor Racing to the Project CARS series a lot.
Things looked good from the outset, many of the old staff returning to carry on the ‘Project’ legacy. Early trailers used music that had been present throughout their games since at least GTR 2 in 2006. Ben Collins (Aka The Stig) returned to give voice-over, and there was a renewed focus on creating an authentic, but enjoyable career mode that mimicked the ups and downs of real-world motorsport.
Given my love for the Project CARS games (I even tolerated the much-maligned third entry), I was excited to get behind the wheel in Project Motor Racing. In terms of game modes available, it’s a little bare bones. Career mode, single race weekend, and challenges are the single player options, and then there’s multiplayer.
The career mode sees the player assume the role of a driver. You pick a budget to start your racing career with and the type of drive you’re going to, a rolling billboard, adorned with sponsorships that allow you to pay your way, right through to a professional that gets paid based on results. There are a decent number of options here that are going to change how your career pans out. This plan of action, along with the accompanying budget, allows you to buy a car and start to tackle several different championships it’s eligible for.
Once you’re in a championship, you pay your entry fee (assuming that it’s not being handled by a sponsor) and head to the track. From that point onward, it’s like any other racing sim, in that there are practice and qualification sessions to take part in, followed by a race to end the weekend. Once any given event is complete, prize money is awarded, repair fees are paid, and you move on to the next one.
That’s about all there is to the career mode. Win races to build up money to buy better cars and enter more prestigious events. It’s fine, in theory. It follows in the footsteps set by titles like Gran Turismo or Forza Motorsport. It’s perfectly serviceable as far as career modes go, it just feels a little anaemic compared to what it could have been.
Single race weekend is essentially the same structure, without any of the career aspects included. Pick any car and track, set your opponents, weather, and race length, and off you go.
Speaking of the cars and tracks, the former is a decent selection of iconic GT cars, Le Mans Prototypes, Group C and GT1 monsters, as well as modern LMDh, GT3 and 4, and GTE cars. It’s honestly a decent list, petrol heads and sports car racing enthusiasts are going to love seeing classics like the Mazda 787B, Panoz Esperante GTR-1, and Audi R8 LM900, but there’s not a great deal else if you’re not into that. One of the strengths of Project CARS was its car selection; there was something for everyone, even if some were far better than others.
This is definitely a much tighter and more focused collection of some of the most famous cars to ever hit a racetrack, but there’s not a huge amount of variety.
When it comes to tracks, it’s not the largest list, though some amazing circuits that aren’t seen all that often are present. Spa-Francorchamps, Mount Panorama, Nurburgring (including the Green Hell, the Nordschleife), Daytona, and Sebring are all here, but there are some notable omissions. Many of the remaining tracks are unlicensed, too. Silverstone, for example, is simply called Northampton. Monza is Brianza, and Imola is San Marino (while still using the Emilia Romagna GP monicker, which I assumed was a copyrighted term?).
It’s fine, it’s just a bit odd.
Also, for any game that is essentially a celebration of endurance racing, locking Circuit de la Sarthe (the Le Mans 24 Hour venue) behind a distant DLC paywall should be a floggable offense.
Overall, there are 16 venues (excluding the eventual DLC), and most have several different layouts, so there’s plenty of asphalt to get around.
The tracks themselves look great. Visuals have never been something that the Project series has struggled with, and Project Motor Racing is no exception. While it doesn’t quite hit the heights of Gran Turismo 7 in this department, what does?
I guess at this point, we should move on to how these cars and tracks actually drive. I’m still undecided as to whether I like how the cars I’ve tried drive at this point. There’s a greater sense of weight transfer over, say, Project CARS 2, even on a controller; it’s very apparent what’s going on underneath you. With that said, it feels like some cars have been made intentionally difficult to drive. It’s something that sim racing has struggled with for a long time, the notion that realistic means difficult, which is simply not always the case.
It could be that the default setups aren’t very good, because after some tinkering, I found cars to be much more drivable. This was certainly the case in prior games.
I found the driving to be mostly enjoyable, albeit with a few issues that spoiled the experience somewhat. Automatic gears seem to really struggle with downshifts in some cars. The AI, while generally decent, occasionally seems to just forget that it’s racing and does weird things like brake-checking. Penalties are currently a bit of a joke; almost any off-track results in a two-second penalty (or mandatory slowdown), regardless of whether it was advantageous or not.
Each of the cars sounds suitably visceral when powering along, engines roar, turbos whine, and tyres scream when pushed beyond the limit. That is, when the audio is working, anyway. One major bug I frequently encountered was the sound stuttering; my very first time on track was greeted with it. There doesn’t seem to be any kind of rhyme or reason to it, and it comes and goes of its own accord. It’s distracting, nonetheless.
Performance on my machine was solid, through that’s to be expected with a 9950 X3D and RTX 5090. It wasn’t outstanding, though. Admittedly, this was on max settings at 4K, and the game never got close to dipping below 60fps, but it required frame gen to get anywhere near my monitor refresh rate of 160Hz. Thankfully, there’s full suite of options to tinker with in order to get the most out of the game. Multiple different forms of upscaling and frame generation, and a huge list of in game visual settings to tweak to get it just right.
Steam Deck
Project Motor Racing boots without issue on Steam Deck, however, the Deck just isn’t powerful enough to get a playable experience. With all settings turn down or off the absolute best result I got was hovering around the 17-20fps mark. It’s a shame, but not unexpected given the fidelity and high system requirements of the game.
Final Thoughts?
Even now, I still don’t know quite where I stand on Project Motor Racing. Everything it does well, it does very well; clunky menus aside, the presentation and visuals are great, and the sound is wonderful when it’s working properly. The small issues, however, ultimately soured the experience for me somewhat.
There’s definitely a solid sim racer in here, and with some updates and DLC, it’ll no doubt mature into something solid.
I don’t dislike Project Motor Racing by any means, but for now I don’t love it either, and no one is more disappointed by that than me.
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