Recent reviews by Timberwolf

It's rare in modern times to find a developer who actually listens, and upon being told their "online only" requirement is both broken and unwanted goes back to the drawing board, rethinks, and puts out an update with all such nonsense completely removed from the game. Compared to Microsoft/Turn 10 who after 19 months are *still* trying to foist unwanted FOMO mechanics on players in Forza, it's a revelation.

Update 0.2 is the one which makes Assetto Corsa EVO feel like the original Assetto Corsa's early access; a little rough around the edges, but a sublime driving experience. As with the original, you can fire up a quick hotlapping session to see what a car is like and still be trying to improve your laptime half an hour later.

Strong caveat: it's an early access title, and if you're not happy to live with the early access gremlins such as occasional crashes, unpolished systems and only fairly basic race modes in place then it's going to annoy you, but if you understand the territory there's a decent amount here to play with. Updates may be slow but it does feel like since the return of Stefano, Kunos are using it as a genuine opportunity to gather feedback and alter course unlike so many "early access" periods where a developer proceeds along a fixed roadmap without ever listening to what their community are telling them.

It's not perfect yet, but there's a lot of promise here now compared to 0.1

I wanted to like this game so much despite the launch bugs, but the more I play it the more I realise you're paying up to £90 for something with mechanics that belong in a free-to-play mobile game.

The career is short and dull, a boring grid of events which is so slim most cars in the game don't have any events to use them in. But worse than this, the promise of a "live service" game turns out to be time-limited events which disappear a few weeks after they've been added, together with cars that the developers proudly claim will "never be available again". So you'll spend a fair chunk of your time in-game in a joyless grind to unlock cars you might otherwise never see again.

There's a lot of potential here in the physics, which are some of the best I've encountered in a game of this type, but if you're looking at buying the game now you'll already have 2-3 cars for which the models and textures are sitting on your hard drive and yet you will *never* be able to access them, because the game is designed around FOMO mechanics and time-limited content rather than having anything approaching a satisfying single-player mode. A problem which is only going to get worse over time.

I live in hope they'll realise this is one of the easier problems to fix and leave the events there to build out that too-small career mode, but right now it's a very expensive game that is just going to leave you annoyed every time it tells you something else is about to disappear without trace.

Add in the litany of complaints about poor quality 2005-era car models, technical issues and poor performance unless you have a high-end graphics card and fast SSD, and a laughable lack of attention to detail such as AI cars with widebody kits keeping their original wheel spacing, and unfortunately Forza Motorsport is firmly in the "do not buy" category right now.

Was fine at launch but later versions have introduced their own Ubisoft launcher which hasn't been tested properly, resulting in poor game performance and constant crashes.

The Kerbals are not currently in space, and it is your job to put them there. Sometimes you even bring them back.

Some variant of Transport Tycoon has been installed on every computer I've had since my 486 DX4/100, and the preferred variant has been OpenTTD from the moment large maps were introduced back in 2005 with 0.4.0

There have been many transport games since, but I don't think any has ever had the magic combination of scale, ease of building or the way that after a few hours of play you now have 35 trains arriving at the same station, the input and output are crying out for optimisation and before you know it the clock is reading 2am just like it used to in the 1990s.

What makes OpenTTD great is the many core developers who've contributed to it over the years have known exactly how fragile that magic gameplay balance of the Sawyer original is; features are added thoughtfully in a way that complements and extends the original game, while never disrupting that addictive loop of extending, optimising and troubleshooting your transport network. It's one of the most polished open source games going, too; graphics and sounds are consistent and well-matched, features and options work and make sense, and despite 15 years of playing I've only ever seen a couple of crashes, and only in experimental nightly builds.

In places newer players may get frustrated by the occasional limitation of a game design from 1994; you won't be given tutorial guidelines and while there's plenty of feedback to be had on how your business is running or what to do next, you'll need to find it yourself in the many charts, maps and reports. But that's exactly what the developers set out to do - so successfully that it's not just for people who want to play Transport Tycoon Deluxe as they remember it, but a fantastic transport game in its own right.

I said I'd revisit my review of Project CARS 2 if the tyre heating problems came up in a patch note, and now they have.

What a difference a patch makes. The handling from the development versions is back. Tyres heat up and cool down as you'd expect, making race cars feel athletic, hot hatches nimble, and cars like the Group A Sierra hard-to-tame beasts.

So now that the classic SMS launch day gremlins are starting to be corrected, what do we have?

Essentially, it's Project CARS but *more*. Specifically, more consistent. The original always had those moments when you'd be lost in the moment, wondering if your tyres would last while you reeled an opponent in... but then a car would drive over the grass at full speed and ram you off the track, reminding you that it's all just bits, bytes and AI.

PCars 2 doesn't do this to you, now we're a few patches in and things are settling down. You'll get through entire races with that feeling of being in the moment, not just isolated laps. The handling improvements help a lot with that, but possibly an even bigger factor is the quality-of-life improvements. No more Ben Collins jabbering in your ear every corner until you turn him off; here the pit radio only comes to life when it's useful. The race engineer is handy when you want to make small tweaks to a setup. You finally get to choose the colour of your car.

The counter-argument to that is that this can come across as more a remastered, improved Project CARS than a genuinely new game. And it's a valid criticism. If you bounced off the original, you'll probably bounce off this one too. But if, like me, you found it had promise even when it was being frustrating, then the sequel is definitely worth the look. And if you haven't tried a PCars game before, then start with this one - it's a big improvement.

Patch 1.2? I'd say it's a recommendation now.

There's something about Nations Forever. Most car games, if I play them in company, elicit at best a shrug. But fire up this one, let someone else hear the buzzing engine sounds, and almost immediately comes the call of, "is that Trackmania? Is there a server up?" Even people who don't play racing games play Trackmania.

Nations Forever (the Stadium environment from United, packaged as a free game) seems to strike the perfect balance between speed and handling. It's easy for beginners to pick up, but mastering it takes time. I'm not sure even Nadeo know how they did it - I picked up United from enjoying Nations Forever so much, but none of the cars have the deftness of the Stadium car, even though the environments may be prettier.

I went for a drive and my headlights fell off, so I had to go out later to pick them up off the road and bring them home. This is all you need to know about My Summer Car.

For UK fans, Brands is almost worth the price of admission itself. It's a lively rendition which rewards practice and allows some close racing. The Escort and little Lotus are standouts too. Great fun to slide around, especially on the dips and cambers of the Hatch.

That's good because the rest of the pack... well, there's some nice stuff and maybe other cars will grow on me given time but a lot of it is a bit samey. I struggled to actually find what had been added to my car roster at first. Minor variants of existing vehicles? Another brace of GT3 racers in a game which is at its best simulating ordinary road cars and classics? It feels as if a lack of inspiration is setting in...

But ignore those quibbles and think of it as a pack with 3 or 4 great cars and a characterful track that's easily one of the best in the AC lineup and it's worth the money.

If Assetto Corsa is the best driving sim available, this has the potential to be the best *racing* sim. I say potential, because there are some serious problems getting in the way of that... but when it's on point, the feeling of managing the car and tyres, battling against the weather, and trying to eke out a few more hundredths of a second are good enough that you start to forget you're playing a game. Even little things like the morning sun obscuring a braking point in an early qualifying session add hugely to the experience.

Mentioning that sun, it's a gorgeous looking game too. The lighting model and weather effects stay just the right side of overblown, so whether it's a sun-bleached day in California or a drizzly, overcast British afternoon on track, you feel - well, there.

But there are clouds over the experience, and not the game's own lovingly rendered storms. The first is that the game is a bit buggy. Not catastrophically so, but every so often it'll hang while loading, or get stuck trying to skip a practice session, with no option other than to kill it via Task Manager. But that's far from the biggest problem.

The biggest problem is the AI. Sometimes, for a few corners, the AI can be some of the most convincing I've seen in a racing game. They race each other, they try to block overtakes, they'll squeeze you off the racing line while stopping short of contact, and they'll defend sensibly going into a corner. They even make some plausibly human mistakes under pressure. But then it'll all fall apart. And when the AI falls apart in Project Cars, it does so in a big way.

I've watched AI cars leave the track and travel hundreds of metres across the grass for the sole purpose of ramming the player. I've sighed as they try kamikaze divebombs up the inside of a corner that can only ever end up in a crash. I've boggled as they leave the track, drive alongside the player car, then turn hard across the track. It makes it impossible to have a satisfyingly close race, because you know sooner or later the computer is going to make a suicidal, stupid move that no real driver would ever consider - the kind of move that will definitely end their race in the hope it will also end the players.

(Although to add to the woes, the AI operate under different physics to the player meaning they often get away scot free with causing spins and crashes)

I'm confident SMS can fix the bugs. I'm not so sure they can fix the AI - and that's a shame, because it's all that stands in the way of Project Cars being the best racing game so far created. Even as it is the game deserves a cautious recommendation, because the racing (providing you keep your distance from the AI cars and accept the need for an occasional restart when they ram you during an overtake) is just that good.