Trackday Manager

I have been playing multiplayer games for ~ 20 years now and after all that time i usually don't end up having adrenaline rushes anymore while gaming.. anger.. sometimes.. but not the good adrenaline rushes. but this game.. i just had a race were the competition for place #1 was so close, i was clenching in my chair and hoping that my driver doesn't make any mistake anymore, when i pulled out of pitstop just a car length in front of him, i was so happy and then he overtook me, but i could get back in a corner and it kept going like that, back and forth and then in the last curve he was on my ass and his car was faster in the straights, but with a good use of the block feature i just managed to stay first by half a car length.. it was so epic. it doesnt matter if the game has placeholder sound or lacks content at the moment (its early access, remember other reviewers, there will be more stuff added, there is a roadmap posted). the gameplay is right and it is fun and they are on the right way so far for sure it has the thrill, and so far a very nice community that talks to each other and with people appreciating a good fight, hoping for a good race for each other vs the bots. i like it.. i should be playing Witcher 3 or GTA5 and i sit here and play this early access game hour after hour.

TLDR; Cool concept, for a pretty niche community. Unfortnately there's no singleplayer mode and finding other players can take upwards of 10 minutes. Controls can feel unresponsive, but gameplay is genuinely fun. Online community feels dead and the game lacks varitey and customisability. I imagine they'd also be rolling out more updates in the future for more content, as it is there are 6 tracks and 6 different cars. When you start out you have no cars theres 6 to pick from and you have a choice of the first two as they are under 200K which is what you're given when you start out. The car models do look pretty good and was impressed with the details they were able to put into the models. After buying the car you want, take it to your garage and with whatever spare cash you have left you might be able to get an upgrade. The upgradeable aspects of your car are the brake, ECU, Exhaust, bodywork, suspension, KERS, spoiler, cooling and a few others. Upgrades will change the car in terms of fuel economy, top speed, accleration, drag, braking power and do matter. For instance the car I was using was kitted to last only about 25km's without pitting but I had constantly more power to use and ended out on top. Most races won't be longer than 50km's, also note drivers can be more fuel economic whilst driving. Once you're actually in-game it's pretty fun, you instruct your AI driver around and tell him when to use KERS, push harder, when to change the car's fuel map, pitstops and block. Controls can feel like they are unresponsive at times but that's due to driver stats which can be upgrades with experience points. Experience points can be used to increase the speed of certain aspects of your pitstop, increase the skill of your driver; how confident he is with braking and overtaking and how much speed he can carry through corners. You also have a manager who handles all your sponsorship contracts, you can give him greater chance of securing a contract and he can land better contracts for you aswell. Contracts themselves aren't overly fun to handle. You're given 10 time units and every action uses a certain amount of time units, time units are replentished after each race. Pretty easy mechanic but monotonous is a good way to describe sponsorship (10/10 immersion there). To actually land a deal you need to call up the sponsor which you might or might not get through to. Once you're in you can invite them out to dinner, send them gifts, give a presentation on your raceteam few other options I've forgotten. Each option will better the relationship between you and whomever you're chasing up. Once a you manage to squeeze out a contract offer you can change the aspects of the contract, how much you get paid, for how many races and what position you need to come in to adhere to those conditions of receiving the funds. All up I would recommend this game if they added more varitey and the online community was bigger, it's a fairly niche market so this game may never live up to it's full potential. In it's current state I wouldn't recommend this game. Apologies for the length of the review, it all got a bit out of hand. Cheers.

The game is dead, last patch from august 2016, the devs doesnt answer. Just 5 cars and 6 circuits. It had potential, now is a ghost game with 0 people playing and 0 updates. DONT BUY IT!

240 hours in... best thing i can say is... It's a good idea executed extremely badly. Each new "patch" seems to make the game worse and or more glitchy. It was in it's simplest and best form during EA but now it's turned to crap. What pisses me off the most is that on certain tracks the car will just lose traction, jump, slide off line when in reality the car would be stuck to the road. It took them 4 months to repair a bump in the road on Circuit De La Luna... only it wasn't fixed, they had just made it worse and made the car slow down to a stop when you went over it. If this game had been made by actual programmers instead of teenagers in their bedrooms I'm sure most of the racing community would play it, because like i said, it's a good game executed so badly it's embarrasing.

In this game you become the manager of your own racing team. You won't find here popular car brands like Ferrari or Maserati but just a fictional racing cars. [h1]Overview[/h1] As a team manager you can sign new sponsor offers and help the driver to drive around the track. By earning money out of every race you can then upgrade the car or buy a new color design. The racing itself is from 3rd person perspective so you see a very small cars. As a team manager you can instruct the driver to: overtake, overload, block or tail the following car. The second set of options is: KERS button, changing the engine's ECU fuel mapping or requesting the driver to make a pitstop. Instructing the driver to overtake the following car can be from the left or right side and it works pretty well but sometimes the AI fails causing strange situations. The rest of the options work pretty well. [h1]Game modes[/h1] Single race or cup mode - new in the game. In the cup mode you also have qualification lap which i felt lacking before. Cup mode provides you also some more fun because of strategy, because there are 3 races that are longer and therefore you can go on one pitstop or two. [h1]Balance [/h1] The game is all the time on the same level. When you start there are many cars faster than you and some of them are slower. It means that after you do the upgrades to the car your car becomes more competetive and heads to the front of the opponents. After you upgrade your car to the maximum you fight for the first places. It means that after you do it your car is always in the front so if you don't have real players as the opponents, you almost always fight for win. There should be some racing categories or one type of car races to make it more interesting. [h1]Multiplayer[/h1] It's the first issue - because the game doesn't have singleplayer, the game is always looking for online players. Sadly almost all the time you compete with the bots and maybe 1-2 real players. [h1]Graphics & audio[/h1] Everything looks very nice, has good sounds. The music becomes a little boring after 5 or 10 races but you can turn it off. Some optimalizations must be made to the game because of the high cpu/gpu usage, but so far it works nice. [h1]Summary[/h1] There are still some bugs like for example disapearing wheels, lapped cars still fight like they were racing while they shouldn't. The game needs some work but the direction is so far very good and i can recommend this game. If you like racing games, you'll definetely like this one! Take a look at the stats of my profile here http://www.trackdaymanager.com/profile/?order=totalScore&nationality=Poland&teamID=1888

A game that had the potential, but just falls flat. It contains elements of what I wanted from a racing management simulator: sponsorship deals, six cars to choose from, a few good tracks, upgrades, stat point upgrades, leaderboards… That being said it's lacking in core features and polish. This lack of polish gives the game that Free 2 Play grind feeling with the price tag. Want to be competitive on the oval track? Better save up for that car that's good on ovals and then hope you have that car equipped when the game randomly selects the track for you. Granted, smart strategy can get you past these pitfalls, but it's still a major grind and you're fighting the RNG to get the track you want to race at. Most game modes are locked with a promise of a later release date. The game has its share of bugs (DNFs causing money loss in cups in following races, wrong tires being put on cars, bots getting stuck on walls and winning awards because of it, driver commands not working at times). Also, the netcode cannot handle large fields with 200ms latencies across players. In my opinion this game was released from early access way too soon. With the small player base, you're relegated to racing against bots 98% of the time. In the times we did get a league race together with 8-12 other players (the max field size is 16), the game would become unplayable. Laps wouldn't be counted, pit crew animations would completely vanish, and the lag was unbearable. I had dedicated 70+ hours to this game, helped build a subreddit, and tried to be an active member in the community. Arctic Hazard Game Studio was very responsive and even quickly provided a patch to allow us all to race together as a group. While I commend them for that, it hasn't entirely redeemed a game that has such critical flaws. It does show they do care about Trackday Manager, but it got rushed to market before it was ready for showtime. It’s a shame, because I really wanted to like this game. There's not a lot of options in this genre and there really should be. It's something that if done well, could be a big hit. I recommend not buying this title, not even on a sale price in it's current state. If/when the developers do release a trial/F2P version of the game and you are interested, try that out first. If upcoming patches makes major changes to the game, I will be more than happy to re-review this.

I have done a review on this game before. However upon the new update and seeing the game slightly differently, I want to change my thoughts on the game slightly. I still maintain that this is a good game. What isn't so good is the way it's being handled (much like Wreckfest from what I've read). The game has been on a slightly less than steady decline for awhile now. Some of this has to do with the fact that finding players in the lobby is difficult, the wait time to find a lobby in the first place is annoying and that the amount of updates for the game have been really (really, really, really) slow. Of course there are times when games have less updates than what the community would ideally want. However TrackDay manager has passed crossed that line by a big margin now. If you want this game then I recommend you understand these three things in order to enjoy it. Finding other players that aren't AI is going to be hard: I don't know if there is some sort of Steam group right now that has players that will play this game on a semi-regular basis, but if there isn't then that made it that little bit harder to find players to race with. Finding lobbies to race on takes awhile, have patience: It takes about 110 seconds for the game to find a lobby, I know it's ridiculous but just make a snack or something in the meantime. Maybe watch a TV for a few seconds. There are other people that have been playing since the game's releasing, so they may have better cars than you: Try not to get too frustated if you can't beat other players, they probably have better cars anyway. Just try your best and take anything above last as a win. This is by far from being a terrible game. It's not even that far from being a great game. What holds it back is the lack of updates the game has been getting. I do recommend this game but only if you understand what I've listed above. This game isn't hard to enjoy but it can be difficult to not get very annoyed at it. In short: It's a good (and quite enjoyable) game. However it needs to be handled better than it currently is.