IS IT WORTH IT?! | A Review of Assetto Corsa in About 3 Minutes!
404A detailed and honest review of Assetto Corsa Competizione in about 4 minutes! We make game reviews, without the fluff. Subscribe! :)
This game is a thoroughbred racing simulator, quite possibly the best one in the world right now, and although the base game only contains GT3 cars, with a line up of GT4 cars and 8 additional circuits available as optional paid DLC, what it lacks in outright content compared to other games I think it more than makes up for in sheer playability and an unwavering dedication to realism, without being overcomplicated or inaccessible to more casual racers unlike some of the other racing sims out there today.
Now this being a simulator I spent most of my time playing with a racing wheel, the Thrustmaster TS-XW, and the driving feels fantastic, like mind blowingly good, ALMOST, I dare say, as good as the real thing, but being the hard working and occasionally half decent content creator that I am I also gave it a go using a gamepad and even a good old fashioned keyboard, and honestly? It was still pretty great… The cars felt perfectly drivable and I was still able to stay relatively competitive, but if you intend on taking your racing even remotely seriously then do yourself a favour and get a decent force feedback wheel for maximum immersion and control over the car.
Anyway let me briefly explain what I mean by driving feel. In real life you feel what the car is doing just as much through your arse as you do through the wheel itself, but there’s only so many ways a game can tell us what our virtual tires are doing because it has to route all of the information from the tyres directly through the wheel in a way that still feels intuitive to our little human brains.
That includes everything from road grip, any sudden loss of traction, changes in wheel resistance between different surfaces and so on, and right out of the box it detected my wheel and gave it a default setup that felt spot on in any condition. All I had to do was reduce the steering range of the wheel for my own personal preference and I was good to go, and I can’t think of any other racing sim where I didn’t have to fiddle with force feedback controls for half an hour before getting to race at all, so for that reason alone it gets huge props from me.
Out on the track though things only get better. Not only are the graphics ridiculously pretty to look at but the feeling you get through the wheel when you go from a nice warm sunny day to an overcast sky with puddles all over the circuit is REALLY immersive, and as the rain starts to dry up you can see the most common racing line drying first, and as you might expect the dry patches have more grip than the horrifyingly unstable puddles and debris lining the less worn in sections of the track.
You can even get flat spots on your tires if you brake too hard, and although that’s not something unique to just ACC, what is pretty special is if you lock up in the same part of the tire again, you risk getting a puncture!
Long story short, just like in real life the game makes you have to adapt to the ever-changing conditions of the dynamic weather and day/night cycle, and you really have to adjust your driving style depending on the prevailing conditions, and the way the game tells you what’s going on with the car through the force feedback in the wheel feels really intuitive.
Content-wise the base game features 11 laser-scanned circuits and full support for a singleplayer career mode with believable and challenging AI drivers, plus competitive multiplayer with its own proper safety rating system not too dis-similar to iRacing that’s there to encourage safe and respectful driving and punishing reckless drivers that would otherwise ruin the race for everyone else and all the online races I took part in even starting from the very bottom were really clean and tons of fun.
If you decide to go all-in and get all the available dlc’s then the amount of tracks goes up by 8 to a total of 19, plus opens up the otherwise GT3 only game to include cars from the GT4, GTC and TCX leagues as well. I think the DLC’s a really fairly priced at between 9 and 15 euros each at full price, and even if you get them all it’s still far cheaper than iRacing.
*PC Specifications*
Operating System - Windows 11
CPU - Intel i7 8700k 3.7ghz
GFX - Nvidia RTX 3070
Memory - 32gb DDR4 (4 x 8gb)
Game is installed on an SSD
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