Man, I really wanted to enjoy all aspects of this game but it just fails to deliver in two critical areas, one of which is very easy to fix too.
The biggest crime of all is that it simply doesn't feel like I'm driving a car. Clean precision driving is out of the window and instead you have to throw your car into corners almost as if you were driving rally cars on gravel. There's very little feeling of driving using a fanatec wheel. I was hoping they'd go for that semi arcade, semi simulator middle-ground that is occupied by Forza, Gran Turismo and few others. Even Codemasters' other franchise, F1 series, manages to do it very well. I really enjoy driving F1 2013 although it's clearly in the semi sim, semi arcade realm.
The other big issue is AI speed. Very hard AI just isn't fast enough. It's a common problem with many racing games with limited AI options. Forza suffers from it, most recent Codemasters games suffer from it etc. That being said, when I start from the last position, I really enjoy driving against the AI at least until I have passed the pack which often happens in few laps, but thankfully not always.
Track & car selection is excellent, visually it's very nice and runs extremely well. I could live with the slow AI especially if I turn down the race length to minimum. But man, the driving model just completely fails to deliver. Maybe it gets better with other cars, I have only tried few of them so far. Maybe the physics are moddable? I haven't really followed how the recent Codemasters games are in that regard. All this negativity aside, it's mostly a great game and I'll playing it for a little while longer but I'm afraid I'll soon go back to F1 2013 for my "compete against AI" fix.
