Project Motor Racing is the newest simulation Straight4 Studios, a studio composed of simulation racing development veterans. There’s a healthy amount of cars, classes, and tracks that will offer hundreds of hours of racing both online and off. It’s a game that exists in a space of unadulterated realism and professionalism to motorsports, but manages to be an unexciting debut from Straight4 Studios. Project Motor Racing is focused so hard on the gameplay, that everything else feels like an afterthought.
As the name would indicate, this is very much a game in the vein of Project CARS. And that’s bolstered by the fact that it’s led by Ian Bell, who helmed Slightly Mad Studios to product Project CARS. You can see and feel a lot of the DNA of that game here. Now, this is not an exact copy of that game. In fact, this is a whole new game with an entirely different focus, and this is to the game’s benefit. This is a game for simulation racers, and if you’re not one, is a game that could mold you into one.
Project Motor Racing assumes you know how to play a game like this, and if it’s your first time, good luck. There’s no onboarding, tutorial, or even a video to greet you. You’re given a menu, the first of which is multiplayer, but don’t start there. One caveat: because I played this prior to launch, I did not play the multiplayer in any capacity. To note, the developers have talked about the online component, saying: “No passes. No rentals. No subscriptions”. This is pointing the finger at iRacing who charges a subscription fee to race in their game after it’s purchased. That said, I have no knowledge on how the servers will perform or handle different configurations of players and across different regions, connections, and control types.
The single-player is where you want to learn how to play the game, despite its lack of introducing the player to anything that’s going on in Project Motor Racing. You could jump into a Race Weekend, but it’s too tempting to select your favorite vehicle or class, and jump into a race, but find yourself turned around on turn one. Trust me, I know this. Instead, I highly encourage you begin a new career, and I would choose classic difficulty to be able to fine-tune the AI difficulty to your liking. Whereas authentic difficulty will keep everything at 100%, and not allow you to restart races, this will make your life so much harder than it has to be. Then continue by starting in the Journeyman path, as this gives you a paltry $100,000 to start your racing team by racing either Mazda MX-5’s or Porsche 911 Carrera’s. This is the way. From here, you’ll have to partake in full race weekends from practice to qualifying to the actual race. It’s all up to you whether you are successful or not, and determined by how you’ve selected your sponsorship program, how profitable this becomes. If you can steamroll your successes, you’ll rise in the ranks to different classes like GT4 to GTO to GT1 and even LMP. The car selection has nearly everything you would want, with your fair share of DB9s, Corvettes, Camaros and Mustangs, Huracans, to include esoteric racers like the Storm GT and the Mosler MT900R. Though you will have to manage your money, especially if you incur damages during a race, you’ll have to pay for them out of pocket. Same goes for entering races, you’ll have to open your wallet to participate. Focusing so much on money management is key to any motorsport.
There is a challenge mode, and initially this was unplayable as the server for accessing these challenges would never connect, hard-locking me out of the game. A recent update has allowed this mode to work and get to know it. This is where you’ll find the true definition of challenge, all of the endurance races are. This is a mode no one should touch until you’ve gotten at least a couple dozen hours here. For one, the cars available in this mode are high-tier, and unless you’re a veteran of these kinds of games, you won’t have fun unless you’ve put in some serious hours behind the wheel of them. Secondly, they are no joke on difficulty and time commitment involved, so you need to be ready for it.
The race tracks in the game are dominated by being located in North America and Europe regions. There are only two tracks from the rest of the world, like Australia and South Africa, so you won’t find any tracks from Japan currently. There’s really no disappointments here, you’ve got Daytona, Nurburgring, Sao Paolo, Northampton, and the like. There’s multiple configurations per track, allowing you to find and play your favorites with ease.
This is a game that lets you tailor your assists to how you like, by setting ABS, traction control, racing line, transmission, and so on. There’s also an advanced setting to further fine-tune everything, to include a racing wheel with its support. The game also allows you to tune vehicles, but doesn’t do anything to help the player understand what these settings are. An interesting note, is that even if you have automatic transmission selected, you’ll always have to manually shift into first to leave the pit for practice or qualifying. Weather becomes a character of its own, as it can change dynamically during a race, and you can feel the difference as the track becomes more slick from rain. I did find that the AI can be weirdly aggressive to the player, and not back off of their line they running, even if you have the advantage. I hope that’s something that gets tweaked in a future update.
It’s hard to realize that this runs on the same engine as Farming Simulator, but it’s true. Project Motor Racing looks great, and runs even better. I had no problems running this game at 180fps with DLSS set to Quality, and Frame Generation enabled. The damage model is probably the most lacking, as you’ll incur the same damage in each quadrant no matter the contact. This too I hope is something that can improve. But as far as performance goes, it will bode well for multiplayer to accommodate most players and their different setups.
My PC Specs:
– Microsoft Windows 11 Pro
– Intel Core i9 13900K @ 5.8GHz
– ASUS ROG RYUJIN II 360 ARGB AIO Liquid CPU Cooler
– G.SKILL TRIDENT Z5 6000MHZ 64GB (32×2) DDR5 RAM
– ASUS ROG Strix GeForce RTX 4080 16GB GDDR6X
– WD_BLACK SN850X M.2 (8 TB)
– LG UltraGear 34GP950B-G (21:9 Ultrawide @ 3440×1440)
Straight4 Studios has a game that’s been cooked properly to temperature, but it lacks flavor. Project Motor Racing boasts an impressive roster of cars and tracks, but no real personality to bring it all together. It’s not very welcoming, but if you put in the work, it can be rewarding. The best thing about the game is its career mode, where clawing your way up the ranks makes each victory feel earned. Project Motor Racing is a rookie in the space, but this is a solid entry that those looking for a game geared towards realism and simulation will find plenty of that here, but not much else.
A Steam code was provided in advance by the publisher for review purposes
