Assetto Corsa Video Game (About In Description)
3An amazing driving experience packaged inside a deeply flawed racing simulation.
Assetto Corsa is a truly triumphant driving simulation. On consoles there’s nothing quite like it, and the fidelity of its incredibly convincing handling really needs to be felt to be believed. Is it the best driving simulator on consoles? Yes; Assetto Corsa is absolutely in a class of its own when it comes to its unflinchingly lifelike physics.
But is it the best racing simulator for consoles, ever? No. Not by some margin. Assetto Corsa features a decent mix of cars (ranging from classic open-wheelers to bleeding-edge hypercars) and a modest selection of European tracks but, respectfully, Assetto Corsa wasn’t the best racing simulator released in the week it hit shelves. That distinction actually belongs to Codemasters’ F1 2016.
While Assetto Corsa succeeds as a fascinating, highly technical, and massively demanding simulation of real-life driving it largely falls over as a robust racing experience due to a wide mix of baffling and sometimes game-breaking problems.
Assetto Corsa first hit Steam Early Access on PC back in late 2013 and was released officially just over a year later, in late December, 2014. Since then it has accumulated a faithful fanbase and has been regularly supported by developer Kunos Simulazioni and a thriving community of modders. It's surprising, then, that after all this progress its console debut feels unfinished.
The most egregious problems occur on track, and the fundamentally flawed penalty system is an especially annoying one. If you get pinged for taking too much curb you’ll earn a ‘slow down’ penalty, but it’s not nuanced enough to let you just drop to and maintain a minimum speed, or simply allow an opponent to redress. You just have to stay off the throttle entirely. Touch the loud pedal, even if you’ve now slowed to a crawl, and the timer will reset. It’s terrible.
There are no consequences for the AI for shunting you off
The chief offender, however, is the opponent AI, which regularly pays no mind to your presence on each circuit and is particularly deft at muscling you onto the grass and turning your car around by poking its nose into gaps it really should have thought better of. This is where the top-notch driving dynamics Kunos has massaged into all the available vehicles becomes a double-edged sword, because it takes very little to unsettle your car at speed. Even a mild tap on the rear fender can and will spear you right off the asphalt, and there are no consequences for the AI for shunting you off. Frustratingly, opponent cars seem curiously immune to any loss of control when the shoe is on the other foot. Make a little contact via an overzealous overtake and you’ll generally come off second-best, while the AI peels away unaffected. It’s telling, perhaps, that in Assetto Corsa all I want to do is stay away from other racers entirely, though in its Pan-European peer Project CARS I relish the aggressive, doorhandle-to-doorhandle pack racing.
But it’s not just their racing etiquette that is wanting; it’s also their common sense. I’ve raced several events over the past few days where the entire field has entered the pits on the penultimate lap of a four- or six-lap race. I’m totally befuddled by how such a weird bug could survive a trip to retail and it helps make Assetto Corsa’s already chore-like career mode feel even more untested.
Career mode is just a real disappointment. Racing sims like F1 2016 and Project CARS bake in career modes that feel authentic thanks to the fact podium finishes are only a prerequisite for those players who’ve chosen to join the most dominant, in-game race teams. The expectations on everyone else are generally more modest. It makes for far better and far more realistic racing when you know you can spend a whole race dicing for an important mid-pack overtake knowing your team is just after, say, a top 10 finish. Assetto Corsa, on the other hand, feels surprisingly old school; it’s top three or bust. There’s no incentive for me to battle it out with the trailing pack; if I’m not within striking distance of the lead group after a couple of laps I’ll just restart. If the AI wallops me off the track, I’ll restart. If I fluff a braking point and spear off into the gravel, I’ll restart. These restart rituals are the kind of thing I practised commonly back on the early Gran Turismo and Forza Motorsport games but since then other racing sims have matured to feature career modes that make you feel like you’re competing as a real race driver. Assetto Corsa’s racing career is really just a fractured series of vanilla assessments you have to complete successfully before moving up to the next one.
The tracks have a nice, real-life, worn feel to them, especially the battered curbs
There is a second way to approach Assetto Corsa and that’s via its ‘Special Events’, although these are just one-off versions of events