izigame.me

Most entertaining racing experience I've had in 20 years. This is a terrific bundle of potential that can only get better.
Pros:
Is the ANNOYING HELICOPTER there from FM7? He's still here but NOT NEAR AS LOUD. Most of the time I can't even hear him but when I do it is subtle. I don't recall seeing him during practice.
Tire model is absolutely fantastic. All the people saying this game is just another Forza must be using a gamepad because with a wheel in full simulation mode with no assists, the game is terrific and light years ahead of the previous titles.
Suspension geometry in general is vastly improved. Drive the '73 911 in FM7 then drive it in this game and see for yourself.
The previous titles were so arcadey when it came to the race cars and anything super fast that I exclusively drove the production cars under 700hp because the grip was unrealistic and the cars didn't compare anything to a true sim. Comparing this game to my real life '20 Mustang and my buddy's '15 Charger, my hats off to Turn 10 for finally getting it right.
Each tire type really feels different which I love. Comparing stock, street, sport and racing is a highly noticeable change in feel.
Turn 10 has always been really good about sound design and that hasn't changed. The cars appear to all have unique sound effects and are very high quality. Changing exhaust or increasing the size of turbos or SCs is highly noticeable.
The previous games were bad about giving you too many free cars and tons of money but then making everything extremely expensive. This game is the opposite with cars being cheap and parts free but money is harder to earn.
Part are a divisive topic: the new car progression system, I personally love it. You have to drive a car to level it up and unlock part availability then use car points to equip them. You can never lose those points so you can swap around different parts without blowing money on something you wish you didn't buy. It creates a sense of development almost like an RPG or something which I like.
I used to get bored and struggle to think of what to do but now I know I have constant projects/goals that I want to achieve.
Career races are another divisive topic. When I am playing singleplayer, I just want a fun race. With this system, I turn some laps to see about how fast I am at that track and then adjust the difficulty as needed to guarantee a close race then adjust where I want to start out in the race and fight for a podium finish. I think it is a terrific system that guarantees a close and fun fight. Multiplayer racing still has qualifying which makes more sense.
Gone is that stupid homologation system from the last game. Now you customize your car as you want and the AI drivers match you by using as many points as you did so it is always a fair race. It also means, you can see 10 of the same car in a race and all 10 could be totally different. One might have racing slicks and a wing but another might have a wide body kit and a turbo. Totally random and I love it. The cars aren't just different colors too, some have liveries even with drivatars turned off.
AI: I was skeptical when the video came out demonstrating the game for the first time. They said it was their best AI yet and then in the same video the idiot AI all drove a single file line with no use of a racing line and even go off track. But that must have been an early version of the game before the AI was ready because the AI is actually really good. Not the best, but still very challenging. There is one caveat which I explain in the cons below. Above all, the AI doesn't cheat anymore and that was the biggest flaw from the last game.
The cons:
Practice sessions exclusively start you out on a rolling start.
Career races are WAY TOO SHORT! Sometimes just 2 laps around an average size track.
Free play races can still be created so you can come up with your own custom races that are as long as you want, BUT...they don't have the same modes as the Career races. There is no practice and you can't choose your starting position. It is like the free play mode from FM7 where you either choose to start at a random spot or you all get in order of PI. They desperately need to make the career style racing available in free play AND they need to add in custom championships if they want to truly compete with folks like Automobilista and the like.
AI issues: while I praised them up above for finally following a racing line and not cheating...they practice collision avoidance a bit too strongly. They aren't perfect and there are still racing incidents...but here is what I mean. They are overly passive. They fight you right up until you are about a half car ahead and then they straight up pump the brakes...not let off the throttle and let you by, I'm talking straight up pump the brakes and end up like 2 seconds back in a heartbeat. On one hand, they finally show they are smart enough to be aware of your presence, but on the other, they are soft, no other way to put it. We need an aggression slider or at the very least, we need them to let off the throttle instead of hitting the brakes to create distance as it makes it too easy to win a corner.
Performance gets its own section:
Stability: I never had a crash in a race in 64.7 hours. I had one single crash in free play mode testing various settings and constantly reloading the same race over again to see the driver lineups. That was likely self-induced so I ain't worried about it. I had two instances of an infinite loading screen, one trying to start the game up on like day 3. No biggie, killed it and tried again and it worked. The other was when changing parts on a car, it said saving forever and I had to kill the game and start it back up. Lost my changes but it didn't happen again when I made the same changes so it wasn't a repeatable bug tied to any of my changes. Game consistently runs at 90-120fps for me and I love it.
Ray tracing: Bugged at the moment and has horrible stuttering at certain tracks and in certain lighting conditions. I can play with it on but it is too annoying so I turned it off until they patch it. I am not mad, it is a brand new game, let's let them fix it up some.
In addition, the optional ambient occlusion part of ray tracing is awful and causes certain wheels to look like blurry plastic. Wouldn't be a problem if you could turn it off separately but it is linked to the ray tracing mode that effects the track lighting and environments so this is a problem that NEEDS to get fixed.
The V-sync drama - For me, the game will not let me turn V sync off. Normally I want it on but it causes the whole game to lag like crazy and becomes unplayable. I tested at lowest possible settings and still couldn't get a steady 20fps. When I switched to a window it all the sudden ran perfectly. I tested some more and found out that the setting to disable vsync doesn't work and it stayed on no matter what when switching back to full screen. Weird!? Doesn't happen to my buddy so I am annoyed. There is NO BORDERLESS WINDOW MODE so I had to use the NVidia control panel to force vsync off so that I could play it smoothly.
With vsync forced off and ray tracing off, the game is gorgeous and works flawlessly. I run 1440p ultrawide with DLSS at ultra quality with DLAA on and everything is on high or ultra. Even at night and in the fog or rain with 24 cars on track. Running a 3090ti / i9-12900k / 32GBs-DDR5-5200 / 4thGen-NVMe
Conclusion:
The game is not perfect but is extremely fun and has loads of potential. Compared to FM7 on launch which was so bugged and had memory leaks so bad that I couldn't even browse the wheel selection, this game is a godsend. Are you looking to replace something as advanced as iRacing? This isn't it. Are you just looking to get your simrig out of the closet and have a blast with some awesome cars? Join me my friends and have a great day ;)