For instance I noticed that a shattered windscreen slows your overall top speed, which is realistic you might think, but the kind of thing a lot of games may miss out.

Each system seems to have special (horrifying) effects when they’re on a warning or altogether severely damaged. It becomes even more scary when you’re doing that in an Open Wheel race, taking corners at speeds in excess of 100MPH. On straight my car would wildly flail to the left constantly if my steering was failing and the suspension had taken a hit. It was however dangerous, as damage played a key role in the experience.ĭamage is a big thing to monitor in Autosport, it can break your 1st place pole if the steering or suspension is broken. Speed was king in those, and cornering was quite frankly beautiful. It also made me realise why Open Wheel races had more laps. Even when I completed a track I had previously driven, it played out very differently with the different styles of cars. It felt like I had mastered a few different styles, and every single race felt different. The swift change from Touring to Open Wheel to Street was great. If you had just completed a Touring season, and wanted a change, you were totally ably to switch to a different set of discipline races and cars. I even hit a 1st place finish on one of my Street race seasons.Įach driving discipline is wildly different, but I must say as a new player to racing games it was refreshing and fun. I certainly did, and after a few too many 8th place finishes before shortly coming to this realisation, I started over and everything went swimmingly. This is probably obvious to racing sim players, but the newer and less experienced arcade racer players would take a few races to discover this. Removing the throttle while entering a corner, and then braking marginally, followed by accelerating into the sharpest turn of the corner was the ideal way to succeed. If you kept your throttle on, and then slammed on the brakes before entering a corner, you’d hit all sorts of trouble. This seemed to be a crucial learning stage.

Tip: let go of the throttle as you come towards a corner, and a few seconds after use the brakes. Driving with raw controls was actually slightly difficult, and it took me a while to learn how the braking and throttling worked for cornering correctly. One thing I learnt is that you shouldn’t expect to come first place unless you have all assistance options turned on. Instead it seems to implement the interesting aspects of difficulties faced in a simulator, but has a large enough buffer to make the entry level players capable of learning a little easier. It’s not as detailed or difficult as a racing sim, but also not as blasé as an Arcade style racer, like Need for Speed. The truly interesting thing about Autosport is that it seems to bring the player between an extremely fine line of Arcade style racing and Simulation racing. The only things I turned on were automatic transmission, and traction control, the rest was left off. You have your various options, including traction control, braking assist, steering assist, automatic/manual transmission, tyre wear, and a fair few other gameplay options.

Once you’ve done these two introductory races, the game skips through an intro video (720p, I can see the pixilation), and then seems to set your race settings to what it deems fit. The objective is to finish the race in any particular position, but to finish it all the same. You start off without a sponsor, in a Touring car race. The obvious idea is to have your team come first in each discipline and class (A – D). The general concept of the aim of the game is to take part in the various seasons (choosing between different disciplines as you please), eventually earning XP for season objective completion.

1080p grid autosport images