Short version: It's great. Go buy it. Genki had literally over 30 years to perfect the car modder/tuner/racer genre, and it shows.
Pros:
- the game looks grrreat, which is expected of an Unreal Engine 5 game
- what is perhaps less expected, given some recent UE5 games, is that performance is also great. I play in 4K with SUPERSAMPLING forced in the drivers, meaning it actually renders in 8K and downscales to 4K, with maximum settings, and with no FSR or DLSS or such upscaling or frame generation, on a 5 year old computer (although admittedly it was top of the line back then.) I've never seen the game drop below 30 fps.
- The physics engine seems to be up there with hardcore racing sims. Seriously, it even calculates in real time how much the car banks or rolls when accelerating, braking, or turning, and whether your aftermarket sideskirt will scrape the asphalt, given your ride height, suspension, camber, etc. But seriously, it even uses exact RPM vs torque and power graphs for all cars. Or literally how much each type of hubcap weighs. I'm at a loss why they call it an arcade racer, when it's more accurate than some sims.
- the race track has a very good mix of tight turns, wide sweeps, 90° turns, chicanes, straights, etc. I'm pretty confident that it would qualify under the FIA's guidelines for a F1 or GT track. In fact, more so than some actual F1 tracks.
- it actually has a progression, like in the good old days
- The sheer number of officially licensed cars is really good.
- The amount of customization for each of those cars is amazing. You can actually replace body parts, typically 3 plus the original for each car part, each with their own stats, and many of those are actually licensed from aftermarket manufacturers.
- ditto for the amount of optical customizations. Roll your own car colour. Put stickers on it. Put an anime character on the hood. Deck it in leopard print. (Literally. And there is an opponent you can't race without leopard print.) Put Adidas lines on it, like in LifeOfBoris's "Slav your car" video.
- a lot of opponents to race, and they and their teams have their own backstories and quirks. (Which includes hidden stats like how aggressively they drive. Seriously, a few will even outright try to shove you off the road.)
- and some of them have hilariously engrish names like "Gothic The My Lord." (The possessive pronoun in English doesn't work like that.) Or a guy is called "Golden Steer." A steer is a male bovine castrated before puberty. Like, dude, TMI about your balls. But it adds that subtle authentic Japanese touch, is all I'm saying.
(Minor) complaints:
- some information in the game is flat out wrong. E.g., the info for one wanderer (think: elite boss) says he won't race against cars with neon lights. It's the polar opposite: he'll ONLY race you if you have neon lights. Another one says she won't race against cars with custom body colours. Again, it's the exact opposite.
- Please, for the love of big anime boobies, when an opponent wants me to drive a specific car, show me the MANUFACTURER too. I've never even HEARD of a "bB Z X Version (NCP31)" before. I'm not a car nerd, much less a JAPANESE car nerd. I end up looking for it in the whole tree, reading every car name. Just TELL ME it's a Toyota.
- Likewise, I wish they'd show me the translation when chosing a license plate. Like, someone will only battle those with a "Kumamoto" number. Doesn't even show me the Japanese letters. Ok, I can go to the garage, check the references, and it does, but those signs mean nothing to me. Going back to selecting a plate, is just an exercise in memorizing and recognizing abstract shapes, no better than if they were a mix of elder Elvish, Klingon and Romulan. In fact, worse. Look, I'm just a semi-otaku; even in my best of days I could barely read Japanese writing at a primary school level, and that was LONG ago. And even that's probably more than most of Westerners ever could. Just please translate for me which of them actually reads "Kumamoto."
- sometimes it gets even more needlessly cryptic. E.g., some guy is only racing against PD cars. I have no idea what "PD" is, and none of the cars in the talent tree have "PD" in the name. Turns out he meant a Nissan GT-R. Well, JUST SAY SO.
- font problems. E.g., when an NPC talks about getting a protégé, the "é" is NOTHING like the "e" in the same sentence. It's a different size, and not just different font, but a different STYLE of font.
- remember when I've said the game tracks stuff like exact torque curves, component weights, aerodynamics, etc? Well, I wish it showed me that data, instead of making me rely on googling what someone else datamined.
- Bouncy NPC cars. At a certain distance, cars do a bounce. Not even a small one. I mean, some will bounce up by a metre or so (about 3 to 4 ft for you imperials.) I assume it's the distance where they switch LOD or maybe where they switch on full physics. It's nowhere near as bad as Skyrim's NPCs falling from the sky, and doesn't affect racing, but once you start seeing it, you can't unsee it.
- Just one save game. Literally, there is no way to try a different build, or line of cars to pursue, without deleting your save and starting a new game (or, I suppose, manually moving files around, but I never tried that.) Which starts from inconvenient at the start, and progresses to outright prohibitive later on. Look, I realize that save space is limited on a console, but this is a PC; I have 2 terabytes free.
- In the same vein, I wish I could save at least the settings for a car and engine. Yes, I know it does save the same for the first part of the tuning options, but when you move to stuff like the gear ratios, you have to manually do it all over again. So when you get to experiment with engine swaps, yeah, deciding between, say, a turbo V6 and a NA V10, means you get to redo the gar ratios all over again if you want to go back.
- Dialogue inconsistencies. E.g., a parking lot dialogue has a guy wishing he could heal HP between consecutive fights. Except in races they're actually called "SP", not "HP". There isn't anything even remotely similar to "HP" in the game.
- Speaking of gear ratios, if I can change the whole transmission AND those, why does each car have its own min and max range for each stage, and final drive ratio, and total number of gears? I know, you're thinking, "but they're different cars, with different gear boxes!" BUT... I already had to replace the gearbox to have that option at all. And realistically, the only way to change ratios is to have someone machine new actual gears for the new ratios, pretty much rebuilding the whole transmission to the new specs. So why can't I build a 5:1 ratio for this car, if they're machining new gears for me anyway? Or if I can put a 1 ton V10 engine in a Trueno (and only Lucifer Morningstar knows where the heck that fits,) why not a 7 gear gearbox? Just saying...
