Recent reviews by FRADICCUS

At first I didn't care too much about the fact that Kunos decided to skip out on the career mode aspect of Evo. I thought "Well, as long as I get the free roam map around the Nurburgring I don't really care."

But then I started to think, and going a bit deeper there are some major implications of this. First of all, the fact that they didn't even announce it through any official channels. Unless you are active in the community, you wouldn't even know there will no longer be a career mode in AC Evo. That is some shady behaviour, Kunos. That is unacceptable. You are literally falsely advertising your game right now.

But let's dive a little deeper in what this means for Assetto Corsa Evo. Initially, AC Evo was supposed to become the end-all, be-all digital hub for the car community. You were gonna start out with a slow, piece of crap sh*tbox and race your way to the big leagues. Like in the old Gran Turismo and Forza games. You were going to be upgrading said sh*tbox, with power mods, suspension mods, aero mods, even engine swaps, customizing it to make it your own like in the old Need For Speed games. Buying and winning newer, faster, better cars and upgrading those. You were going to be driving around in a living, breathing world, earning money by doing missions together with other players also trying to make a living in this world. Delivering packages, completing time challenges, racing other drivers in street races, earning your way to the top. You were going to be able to interact with the world, visiting shops, car dealers, mechanics and doing missions like in Grand Theft Auto. Minus the shooting, of course. All the while doing it with top notch graphics and the latest technology in physics simulation. Imagine Gran Turismo, Forza Horizon, Need for Speed, Grand Theft Auto, Euro Truck Simulator and Microsoft Flight Simulator combined all their best aspects into one game, tailored to the best car-life experience, and you were going to end up with AC Evo.

None of this is going to be a thing any more. Sure, you'll get to drive the roads around the Nordschleife. But to what end? We already have free roam maps in Assetto Corsa. You can drive around the Tokyo Expressway, or the Los Angeles canyon's together with your mates, even with AI traffic. It gets boring after about 30 minutes when you realize you can just jump into any car at any time and just drive. No sense of reward, no sense of progression.

This was going to be the digital car mecha for enthusiasts, not just sim-racers, all around the world. For all, not just those of us who don't have 911 GT3-money to spend in real life. Now it's just going to be another title amongst all other titles collecting dust in our Steam libraries while we're waiting for the next big, revolutionary thing - That thing was supposed to be AC Evo.

Absolutely cannot beliiieeeeeve how hard Kunos dropped the ball this hard by making this decision. There's a reason the original Assetto Corsa has withstood the test of time as well as it has, it deserves a worthy follow-up. Come on Kunos, do better.

Really wish I hadn't spent so much time thinking it would get better so I could still refund it.

The game runs terribly, the UI is the worst in any game I have ever played and everything you do feels like a chore.

Huge disappointment.

Amazing driving sim for all sorts of circuit/tarmac categories. There's so much high quality mod content and with Content Manager, CSP and dynamic weather nowadays it is probably the best value simulator available.

Grid 2019 falls short on all of my expectations, and is a considerable downgrade from the previous entry in the series, Autosport, which will be the main game I will compare this too. As you can see from my gameplay time I have not been able to delve super deep into the career mode, so I will not put too much effort on commenting on that specifically.

Starting with the fundamentals, the actual driving of the game, we are looking at the same floaty, non-existant driving physics as we had in Autosport. I have spent about 80% of the time on a PS4 controller and the rest on my simulator - and I find both methods of playing to leave you wanting a lot more. Where Gran Turismo, Forza, and even another Codemasters game, F1 2018/19 succeed very well in striking a good balance where you can choose between a gamepad and a wheel-setup, Grid 2019 simply falls very short regardless of the choice you make.

The cars behave very twitchy around center lock and the slightest steering input will have you swerve quite aggressively. I tried extensively to get a decent feeling for the controller with the deadzone, linearity and saturation in the steering settings, but I never got it to feel any better than "alright, I guess". For the wheel, I used no deadzone and completely linear steering input for an as realistic and intuitive setup as possible, and while easier to control around center, as soon as you load up the steering through corners it becomes apparent that the game was not made with playing using wheel setups in mind. The cars rarely need more than 45 degrees of lock (my OSW is set to 900 degrees and calibrated correctly in game) even in the slowest of corners and behaves very odd around higher lock steering inputs. Example, I spun out and needed to make a very sharp U-turn to get back on track, and towards higher lock, just a few degrees of turning my wheel, maybe 3-4 degrees, would change the front tire angles massively, we are talking what felt like 20-30 degrees. So much for linearity. Next, the setups for the cars. You can no longer tune the front and rear suspension independently. There is no downforce configuration, or at least so far and with the cars I have available. But with the F1000 which is an open wheel car with both front and rear wing I feel as there should be a downforce slider in the setup menu. The differential tuning is also gone. Not that these things made huge differences to begin with, it would still be nice to have, especially since it's something that was in the previous instalment.

Moving on from the driving itself. Having done about 50% of the first GT series and 25% of Alonso's series, I wanted to try out some big boi cars. But no. I can't do that. In Free Play, or should I say "Free" Play, I can't try out different cars to see what I'd like and then go purchase them in the career mode. No, your game save/profile, has the cars that you've bought using the credits you earn from winning career mode races. No other cars. You literally can not go into "Free" Play and drive a casual race like in a traditional arcade mode, unless you've spent your hard earned cash to buy the car first.

As for the career mode itself, I'll go over it a little quick since I haven't spent too much time to really delve deep and go through the different disciplines, etc. Anyhow. It is much, much less fleshed out compared to Autosport. The races are quite short. Mostly 3-4 lap races of tracks that vary from 40 seconds to 2 minutes. There is a one-shot qualifier before every race, that you can redo if you are not happy with how it went. I tried to find a way to increase the distances, but couldn't find anything. Endurance racing as a category is gone. No tire wear, no fuel management. The AI is quite slow, on Hard I don't need to do any practice and I can start at the back of the grid and still win easily. On Very Hard I might have to do some practice and if I get a decent lap in qualifying I start Pole and win the race with minimum effort. If I mess up the lap but I still start somewhat towards the front, I can usually race to 1st and win. Autosport's career was a lot better in terms of how a race weekend was set up, there was practice sessions, qualifying sessions, the AI was quicker, the differences between the different categories of races and car classes felt much more distinct and the sense of progression and pride moving up the ranks was real. In Grid 2019, all I feel like I'm doing is checking off boxes on a to-do list.

To summarize, the game just feels cheap and lazy. It brings nothing new to the table, while also forgetting what made them good in the past. What did still stay in the game from previous iteratios feel dumbed down and simplified to the point where all the depth and fun is gone. And this was 2019's racing Game of the Year? Give me a freaking break.

# M A K E G R A N D T H E F T A U T O G R E A T A G A I N

Amazing game, solid 10/10.

Bought it for PS3 years ago and played through it at least ten times, just had to buy it on PC so I had it on Steam as well. Great story, insanely deep characters to get to know, spot on voice acting and rewarding tactical combat once you step up the difficulty a bit plus the fact that it will give you a different experience every time you play through it makes this one of my all-time favorite games. Maybe even my absolute favorite game.

Don't worry, there's a TL;DR at the end.

As an avid Uncharted fan, I just had to get my hands on this game after seeing the gameplay trailers for this game. Basically, when I started playing, I could immediately see that they've been inspired basically only from Uncharted. Everything is the same, the climbing sections, how the guns handle, how the story develops and especially those moments when an old crumbled building starts falling apart and you have to climb and jump your way out as fast as you can before the building falls down on top of you - EVERYTHING felt like it was Uncharted, hell, even dying was exactly the same as Uncharted, the screen acting as your health bar becoming greyer and greyer until all color is gone and then you die. The only real differences separating the games was that this game had a lot less puzzles and less climbing sections, focusing more on combat. It also didn't have as a deep story and was less story driven, and the cutscenes felt a bit more stale than the ones in Uncharted. Now, it sounds like I've been bashing this game for being a copy of Uncharted and to some degree I have, BUT, I love the Uncharted series and I love this game too, and it did bring some new things in that weren't in Uncharted, as well as switching some things up to immerse the player even more. I'll list some good and bad things.
+ Introduced RPG elements (i.e skills, upgrades etc)
+ More or less open world - You can fasttravel between camps and explore the island as you see fit, a lot easier to do once you've finished the main story though.
+ A lot of discovering and looting in this game, where you can find ancient tombs with relics, recordings, hell, even modern machine-gun upgrades and stuff, more or less logical.
+ The stealth system works really, really well.
+ The bow is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ amazing. Nothing feels as good as placing a few headshots after one another (I used the bow for 99% of the time).

- The story was quite stale at some parts and especially (*SPOILER ALERT*) after freeing Samantha for the first time from the chinese palace it feels like a chore to go back and save her again. Naughty Dog on the other hand succeeded really well with keeping their story fun at basically all times.
- Waaaaaaaaaay too easy to found ammo and especially arrows, you use the bow to kill a guy, go up and loot him and you find five more - I was never once out of arrows, not even if I'd failed and spammed 10-15 arrows just to kill a single enemy, even though I played on the "Hard" difficulty all the way through.
- At many many points in the game something super unrealistic will happen. I don't want to spoil any specific moments but sometimes you'll just end up like, "Are you ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ kidding me?"

TL;DR
Very, if not purely, based/inspired of the Uncharted series. Story is well designed but can sometimes become boring and dragged out at some parts, especially after the Chinese Palace. Combat and gameplay overall is good. RPG elements makes the game a little more diversed and keeps you going for longer, maybe even after you've finished the main story. The bow is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ amazing. Lara is hot as ♥♥♥♥.

As an Uncharted fan I would give this an 8,5 out of 10, considering what Crystal Dynamics could have done better since I know they have used Uncharted as a major source of inspiration.
Overall, this game is super fun to play and are definately worth the money.

Have some serious issues with "examining" stuff in the game, more accurately, midbattle. It is soooooo frustrating when theres a nearby object that keeps on interrupting my movement and casting during a fight, and especially frustrating when you keep on dying because of it. Is it really that hard to make sure you're able to map any specific action to whatever key you want? Seriously.