Ok, I've played the game once during beta (or alpha, don't know, before it went back to the drawing board), and it was very bland, sterile, with a decent but unimpressive handling model, pretty and mediocre.
Having tried the complete game just now (done 2 of the first races and 5 more time trials), I have to say my impressions are exactly where they were 1 year ago.
It's somewhat pretty - in fact, it should be prettier from everything I've heard from the devs. Rendering particles of this, dust of that, volumetric clouds 10 miles away, I don't care. It you sell that hype, please back it up. Honestly, it looks great but it fails to make jaws drop. It's amazing that it looks wonderful on gifs and offscreen shots, but running in front of you that marvelous spectacle is somewhat missing. That's the first point and let's get this out of the way cause it's the most unimportant one.
Presentation is completely bland. Simple menus and that's it. What happened to "you'll never get out of the first person view ever"? I barely see my guy stepping into the car. The animation is in chunks, with fadeouts. What happened here? Weren't we supposed to be locked in fps mode, entering the car, getting to grips with the dashboard and checking out other cars and stuff? Where's all that? It's choose a race, a car, boom, drive. Where's the pizzazz? You have to differentiate yourself from the competition somehow, and Evo failed to do so in this regard.
When did they ever say that? Pizazz? What do you want them to do shove sparklers up your ass everytime you start a race?
Driving... Where do I start? It's basic, it's simple, it's like every decent simcade racer that came before it. Cars handle nicely and feel heavy. But how come crashes are so unexciting? Hitting another car is like hitting a box. Hitting walls is like hitting wood. Something is missing. This should be better than long gone racers, but it's not. In fact it's worse. It's uninspired. It's by the books.
What?
All those irrelevant words in two short sentence fragments.
Maybe worst of all... It's a racing track. It has walls. It's not like you can drive through vineyards or something. So why the hell does a countdown start as soon as I touch the gravel 5 inches from the asphalt? Really, why? I'm walled in anyway! That's the most obnoxious thing. And penalties for maybe cutting corners. Really? On an arcade racer with guardrails all over the place?
Corridor racers mang whatcha gonna do.
Sound. Damn the first cars sound completely off from the cockpit camera. Muffled as hell. Won't comment on ST since it's a matter of music taste.
You are literally inside a cockpit. Turn on your car and sit inside and rev the engine. Then step out and have a friend do it. They don't sound the same? Man the fucks wrong with your car?
TL;DR. Bland, uninspired, sterile, by the books simcade racer. (I count three buzzwords in this sentence, find all three and get a prize). Product of hype basically. Whereas MotorStorm was something exciting and new, that figured in most best of ps3 lists, Driveclub will be forgotten soon. It's a shame really, it sounded like it had potential, but in the end it's a beautiful game and nothing else. (Oh sorry I thought it was somewhat pretty)
IMHO
