Brady Russell

Not too bad. The game is visually gorgeous on the PS5, as is the details on the cars, and the gameplay itself is pretty thrilling once you get the hang of it. However there’s a number of small annoyances which when combined made the game pretty annoying as a whole. - The difference between the first 2 difficulties is insane. Easy is plain simple, almost feels like a time trial. And then medium is pretty unforgiving. On medium, You could blast your way through a track and make a very small mistake towards the end and get overtaken right before the finish time. This happened to me dozens of times. In the end I played on Easy because I couldn't I've bothered having to go back and ace all the tracks. Scares me to think what Hard and Very Hard are like. - Slightly related to the above, some of the time trial goals are way too varied. On some tracks I cleared the top goal by 10 seconds, on others I couldn’t get anywhere near the basic time, even using the ‘best’ car. - I know there’s a checkpoint system, but if you need to re-spawn your car sometimes it feels like they put you WAY further back than where it should. - Some of the circuits are far too tight and even the slowest and best handling cars struggle to get through it without smashing into walls. Makes me wonder if they actually QA’d some of the circuits. I did enjoy playing through this for most of the time, but I was glad to put it down at the end and I can’t really see myself going to for more.

Pretty ordinary. Paid $30 for it and thought I got still got a bit ripped off. The ‘career’ mode completely lacks depth, variety or any sort of entertainment really. You just go through the same 5 tracks in the same 5 categories of cars until you’re finished with this annoying radio host sounding voiceover constantly harassing you. There’s no cutscenes or anything, you literally just complete one race after the other. However I thought game actually played well, I enjoyed the racing up until about the half way mark where it became a chore. Visually the game looks nice on the PS5 and I liked the sponsorship system to unlock different car liveries. Some of the race bonuses were completely unrealistic though which I was thought was strange, like hitting certain speeds in cars or tracks that simply won’t allow it. Overall I feel indifferent about this game. Pretty forgettable with not a whole lot of soul.

The romance of this game has now worn off after having it a few weeks, I completed the game's career progression and couldn't help but think "Oh right, is that it?" Sure there's missions and licenses to finish off, but what I really want to do is build my car collection which, thanks to the roulette system and latest patch, is almost near impossible. It's ironic that it's so difficult and time consuming to collect cars in a game where that's basically the primary objective. Whether this game actually deserves 1-star at the moment might be up for debate, but it definitely deservers it after the latest patch and I feel like I have a responsibility to make others (and hopefully Polyphony Digital in the long run) aware that the game is pretty rubbish in it's current state and you really shouldn't be able to get away with the obvious push for micro transactions on a $100 AUD game.