SimHQ.com - Motorsports Zone: Review

During the testing of Race Pro, my focus was on what the veteran sim racer would encounter. As such I set the game to Professional mode from the get-go, with all aids off and the transmission set to manual. Although I wasn’t sure I’d like it, I immediately took a shine to having a moving track map as part of the HUD display. Race Pro’s track map includes the positions of other cars on the track as well as your own. This makes learning new tracks a much more efficient experience, as you can flick your eyes to the track map to help you correlate visual features and landmarks with the next upcoming corner. If the map becomes distracting or you feel it’s too much of a crutch, it can be removed with a simple button push.

Overall the game’s user interfaces are logical and well laid out, if at times a bit spartan. Race Pro mimics the standard gameplay options and interfaces found in most PC racing simulations. There aren’t a lot of frills like a “paint shop” or car upgrades, but then again most real racing drivers don’t have access or input to the sorts of things available in games like Forza 2, anyway. They’re distracting frills in a title focused on the challenge of piloting a purpose-built, high performance machine around a twisting ribbon of asphalt.

Evasive Maneuvers

Noticeable in Race Pro is a lack of adjustability of AI strength, making the career mode, even with difficulty set to the highest level, a bit too easy for veteran PC sim racers looking to try out the new title. I’ll expand on this more in the Single-Player portion of the review. For now, I’ll say that on-balance the AI in Race Pro appears to be targeted squarely on players new to racing simulations, geared to offer a challenge without being too discouraging — at least that’s the case in career mode, where there didn’t seem to be a way to pump up the AI to match the skills and experience of a veteran PC sim racer.

Tracks

The tracks look great for a racing sim, but not as lush or detailed as those in Forza 2. I tried out Brands Hatch, Anderstorp, and my personal favorite, Laguna Seca. All of them looked pretty accurate, with proper layouts and elevation changes. I especially liked Brands Hatch, which subjectively looks more realistic than the add-on versions for rFactor and GTR2. The game ships with a wide variety of track types, ensuring that there’s a few circuits ideally harmonized to every class of car in the game — tight, twisty tracks for the slower and more nimble cars, and long, sweeping circuits better suited to heavier and more powerful vehicles.

Like most Xbox titles, the graphics are lush and perhaps just a little bit too vivid in the color palate. This stands in complete contrast to PC-based racing sims, which offer a color palate that by and large seems a bit muted. The tracks also seem a bit dark to me, particularly from the cockpit of tin-top cars and especially in rainy conditions. You just can’t seem to get enough light in the scene to make the track out clearly unless you put your HDTV in a windowless cave.

Curitiba

There also seemed to be some inconsistency in the surface detail and pavement imperfections on Race Pro’s tracks. While some tracks like Brno (a well known track from GTR) have pavement bumps and ripples that can upset a car’s handling and reduce traction, other tracks seem glass-smooth, with no dips, ripples or other blemishes in the pavement that would upset the car’s suspension. That reduces the challenge of mastering some tracks, but the bumpier ones do show that the current generation consoles can deliver the details required in a racing sim.

For veteran PC sim racers, I offer this note of caution: Like all racing simulations, the track pavement graphics have an area of pavement in the braking zone that is darkened by accumulation of tire marks. In nearly every racing sim on the market, the beginning of the darkened area roughly equates to just before where you’ll need to start braking. Not so in Race Pro. Perhaps more accurate than others sims, the darkened pavement starts a bit after the point you’ll need to start braking, thus forcing you to look for other visual cues like distance markers or trees. And the braking points vary from car to car and class to class. The first few times I tried using the darkened pavement as my braking point, I found myself sliding off into the kitty litter. There’s certainly added challenge to basic braking zone identification in Race Pro, which adds a bit of depth and increased demands on the driver, makes consistency a little tougher to achieve, and getting the braking point wrong will either cost precious time or turn your car into a kitty litter snow plough. Kudos to SimBin for shaking things up a bit in this area of track design.

Braking.

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