SimHQ.com - Motorsports Zone: Review

by Chuck "Magnum" Ankenbauer

Alright, race fans, here’s my take: The driving, the racing, the tracks and the cars are all great with Race Pro. You really feel like you’re on the track, you really feel like you’re in a race car: a point-of-view that flexes and moves with the g-forces acting on the car; handling, acceleration, and braking that’s clearly different for each car; fully fleshed-out cockpit detail that lets you see the metal pipes and roll bars, the safety nets, working mirrors, and working gauges. When it rains (yes, rain in a console racer!), the windshield wipers move, and the rain drops splatter onto your windshield and obscure the view, as do the small rooster tails thrown up from the other cars’ tires. It’s all a simply incredible sense of racing and great fun, especially in multiplayer.

But then the negatives raise their ugly heads. In some respects Race Pro seems more like a beta, an unfinished product. So many graphic bugs and glitches. There is too much graphical flickering, close-range pop-up shadows, fences and trees. SimBin’s PC titles always had great sound I thought, and while Race Pro does have some good sounds, they're just not great. Sometimes they cut out in a turn, or most annoying is the sound that you're getting feedback from your microphone, but you're really not, it’s an in-game sound of some sort.

The required unlocking of cars is a big, frustrating detractor. Don’t get me wrong — I can see that while playing the Career mode you would have to start with low end cars and move up and unlock cars, but outside of the career and especially multiplayer races all cars and tracks should be available to the player.

The overall presentation of the game interfaces, especially the multiplayer section is very weak and seems to have been starved of attention during development. The player has to spend far too long trying to set up races. And it’s also a well known situation that although Race Pro claims to support online racing with up to 12 players, when the 8th player joins a game, your Xbox 360 will lock up. I’ve experienced this every time, and I’ve seen others confirm it in online forums.

Race Pro is a great racing simulation game, and for 40 bucks it’s well worth it. Since it’s the only sim title in the console swimming pool, it’s drawing a lot of attention and is representing the entire simulation genre. For that reason, SimBin/Atari need to step up their act and address the scattering of major and minor issues with this simulation ASAP. Fixing the multiplayer-specific issues would be a great place to start.

Cockpit details.

by "Chunx"

As a parochial, discerning fan of challenging (frustrating?) hard-core PC racing simulations, it makes me feel a little "dirty" to admit that there were times that RacePro put a smile on my face. As a devoted fan of the racing simulation genre who hopes to see its fan base grow, I am ecstatic that SimBin has risked their development capital in an endeavor to take racing simulations to the mainstream gaming audience by targeting the fastest growing platform of the electronic entertainment industry.

So, I’ll cop to it: I liked Race Pro. The game’s interface and options are a bit on the “no frills” side and at times gave me the feeling I was ordering dinner in a restaurant still under construction. But once you’re out on the track, watching your opponents through a very realistic cockpit view, Race Pro has the look and feel of a true simulation. It might not have quite the fidelity or difficulty of iRacing or rFactor in every aspect, but for a first effort console sim it’s pretty damn enjoyable for someone of our tastes. And judging by the European game site reviews and console gaming forum threads, it seems that in spite of the lackluster game interface, enthusiasm for the realistic and challenging physics model is starting to win Race Pro some fans in the console racing community. I guess that means SimBin’s gamble may be starting to pay off, and that could be good news for all of us.

Before I delve any deeper into the game I’ll have to do some consumer research and find a more worthy console racing wheel, while I wait patiently for a reputable company to produce a true force feedback wheel that’s up to the demands that a simulation like Race Pro puts on a controller. By that time, perhaps SimBin will be ready with RacePro2 — I sure hope that happens, and thank them for taking the risk to bring us a ground-breaking new title.

If you’ve got an Xbox360, I would encourage all fans of racing simulations to give Race Pro a try. By voting with our wallets, we might just send a message to the industry that for many, how a virtual car handles is more important than whether a title has a plotline and characters — because in a race sim good physics is the plotline... and we’re all certainly characters!

It’s not quite to the standards of iRacing or rFactor, but like those two titles Race Pro demands skilled car control, rewards those who understand car control. It’s a good initial foray into the console world.

Race Pro in a Nutshell

Pros

Good physics model (certainly the best for the Xbox360)
Decent graphics (although not as pretty as some other racing games)
Excellent SimBin sound
Good selection of car types
Highly adjustable controller settings
Racy AI

Cons

Vague and numb steering control (either the MS wheel, the software, or both)
Under-documented controller settings
Frame rate slowdowns
Awkward gameplay controls
Insufficiently adjustable AI strength
Garage setup options
Limited grid size for multiplayer games

Bottom Line

SimBin took some corporate risk, and a bit of media abuse, in their attempt to break the biggest paradigm of the console gaming community by creating a true racing sim for the console. Race Pro isn't perfect, doesn’t raise the bar for physics fidelity, has some graphics issues and lacks many standard features and polish, but it’s a worthy first effort that demonstrates SimBin can deliver a console title with the physics necessary to satisfy experienced sim racers and encourage racing gamers to level-up to a more demanding, challenging — and rewarding — tier of electronic entertainment.

We want your Feedback. Please let us know what you thought of this article here.

Click here to go to top of this page.