It’s been a long time since I’ve played a proper NASCAR-only game. Now, Eutechnyx has taken the reigns for the past couple of years. Does the newly released PC port do justice to old Papyrus fans, or simply embarrass your racing wheel?
NASCAR The Game: 2013 is essentially a port of NASCAR The Game: Inside Line that appeared on consoles in 2012 while updating the roster and stats, and graciously including all of the DLC. All your favorite (current) drivers are here, with fresh faces like Danica Patrick and Travis Pastrana.
Season Mode is as you’d expect. You can participate in full race weekends including multiple practices, qualifying for a position, and then the race itself. All to earn money that with the help of sponsors can allow you to upgrade your car. As you earn new primary sponsors, your paint scheme changes to fit their investment.
One issue with the included Paint Shop, is you can’t use custom paint scheme in Season Mode – what’s the point? Custom schemes can only be used in single player races outside of the season mode, and online. While featuring layers and different paint types, isn’t as robust as what you’d find in a Forza game. However, you can create a look all your own, despite the limitations of the editor and use of custom paint jobs.
Multiplayer provides customizable options and quick race options to take part in just races or full race weekends. Uncontrollable factors can sully the purist racing experience when lag or people purposely crash into you going into turn 1.
The graphical options include a lot to tinker with, like Draw Distance, Texture Quality, Model Detail, Shadows, Reflections, FXAA, Anti-Aliasing, and even the ability to choose your target FPS.
Even when set to their maximum setting, still doesn’t look very impressive as you’d like it to. This partly due to the environments being bland and uninteresting. Only at night does the game look really impressive with multiple, rela-time shadows being cast. Having a solid 60fps for a racing game leaves little room to complain about much else.
Click to read our review of NASCAR The Game: Inside Line
Eutechnyx nails the look and feel of NASCAR. With a full-on Season Mode to show progress, individual challenges to test your skill offline, and a detailed online mode makes it a fully-featured game that looks good, plays well, and will satisfy racing fans looking for a new challenge as well as NASCAR die-hards.
A Steam review code was provided by PR for review purposes
