Metacritic now 72
Seems very harsh from giantbomb but if they didnt like the handling, what can you do?
Hope for a better written review maybe
In an era where driving games on both ends of the arcade-to-simulation spectrum deliver car upgrades and a lot of other things that players can use to tailor the experience to their liking, Driveclub's complete lack of meaningful choices makes it feel like a weird throwback to the old, dark days of console driving games
This encapsulates the problem with so many of the DriveClub reviews today. It's embarrassing that this is just the first paragraph, but the entire review is case after case of reviewing the game for what he wishes it was rather than what it actually is. In this paragraph, for example, he's not actually telling us why this so-called era of "arcade-to-simulation.. car upgrades" is inherently superior to the alternative, or why not having that impacts the game negatively. And he does not address that issue at any point in his review, in fact later going so far as to shamefully suggest that the lack of upgrades meant the game felt
unfinished. This is an acceptable critical thought? This is the bullshit that passes muster these days? Instead, it's Jeff gleefully wishing right from the start that he was playing a completely different racing game with completely different goals, rather than evaluating DriveClub as it succeeds (or not) at its own unique racing goals.
DriveClub is a pure skill-based racer; it intentionally does not have those upgrades because it harkens to a time when racing games had no inhibition between the skill of the player and the competition on the road. There's no amount of hours you can play to earn an arbitrary upgrade to make your race ever-so-slightly better than the others around you. There's no skill bonus you get from playing 20 hours more than your next competitor. It's just your skills, your competitors and the finish line. And there's absolutely no reason why any reviewer worth their salt should be even implying that upgrades are now some necessary component of the genre. They're not. They're one specific path in the genre, of which we exist in an industry perfectly capable of having great entries in all types of racing games.
There are both positives and negatives to this design strategy, and the goal would be to discuss how exactly DriveClub mishandles this approach rather than wishing it chose goals which would make it a completely different racing game. These criticisms are from a position of someone who thinks it's his place to dismiss an entire subcategory of racing games simply because he's too daft to understand the many myriad of ways such things are positive. It's the very definition of lacking the ability to properly analyze a product, and this is his fucking job. He's reviewing from the premise that it's bad from the get go, because he feels since other racing games have upgrades, that means ones which don't feel empty or boring by comparison!
He ends his opening nonsense salvo with an attack of "old school" racing games, as if there was anything inherently negative with those. Some of the best racing games ever made are old school, and are as no-frills and no-bullshit as DriveClub.
So many of these game reviewers don't actually understand the concept of criticism.
