Circuit Superstars Review (telepathictraffic)
Oh, Circuit Superstars, I want to *love* you. Please let me love you.
As someone who used to *love* racing games, but feels the genre in the last decade has been ruined by Sim Nerds, something that I can just pick up and play without having to watch YouTube guides for the weekly race car/setup meta to be competitive online, or that is inevitably compromised on a pad, because I don't want to fill my house with Guitar Hero steering wheels/seats, is so very, very welcome. Sure, I wish someone would just make a modern GT1-3-alike with unlicensed cars, but I'll take "fancy RC Pro Am or Micro Machines or Over Top or Super Off Road" with an old GT-like focus on corner entries and exits.
I love that the devs have kept at this, rebalancing the collision physics since I first played it on console & made things much more fair in traffic, and also new tracks / car classes are the icing on the cake, making this feel like more of a complete package, than something that's a lovely coffee table book like Art of Rally. I also love that they've acknowledged corner cutting / contact are inevitably a thing in racing games, no matter how clean everyone is trying to run, and the penalty system is possibly the most clear cut and fair I've ever seen in any game.
...BUT, and this is where my thumbs up goes to a more sideways one: whoo WHEE, that CPU difficulty curve is real. You go from completely lapping the field in the first 2 difficulty levels to absolutely getting stomped for any small mistake once you move up to the third.
Between the long queue times for online races, and the skill of people who have stuck with this since launch and are superhuman, once you're through the first couple skill levels against the CPU, it all starts to feel a bit hopeless once you clear out the bottom rungs of the championship, which is a shame, because the core here is really fun.
Please let me love you, Circuit Superstars. :*)