[Review] Driveclub

[BoGdaN.]

Beneath Driveclub’s bleeding-edge visuals and omnipresent social features lies a racer rooted in traditional, arcade racing tropes. The handling is easy to grasp, and the focus on fictional, predefined circuits and point-to-point courses in various locations across the world places it in a category separate from super-serious circuit-lappers like Gran Turismo 6 or any of today’s plentiful open-world racers. The result is a fast, fun, beautiful, and accessible racer, although its one that’s a little narrower than most of its modern peers.

Handling trends towards the arcade side of the spectrum, yet it’s considerably less superficial than something like Burnout. The 50 cars in Driveclub brake hard and grip like glue, but the driving model is still nuanced enough to let you feel the difference between a bulky Bentley Continental GT and an eager John Cooper Works-tuned Mini.

It’s one-size-fits-all handling, though. In keeping with the overall arcade sensibilities, even with a bootful of throttle Driveclub’s high-horsepower hypercars spring from the line with only moderate wheelspin, and they seem mostly reluctant to about-face mid-corner in an orgy of oversteer. Even if the back end does step out it generally only takes a smidge of countersteering to correct it. I found it satisfying and entirely in line with Driveclub’s direction, even if it’s a fraction simplistic. The biggest problem I had with it is that the handling’s too sticky to make the drift events much fun; I generally found myself getting bogged down mid-corner because it’s surprisingly difficult to maintain momentum.

Driveclub’s car selection is nicely curated to represent some of Europe’s most desirable sports cars, grand tourers, supercars and hypercars, plus a smattering of hot hatches as an entry point. They look absolutely remarkable. They’re best enjoyed from inside the cabins, where the attention to detail is so extreme that even the windscreens show those subtle semi-circle scuffs on the glass you get from the wipers when the glare of the sun catches them. Supercars like the Marussia B2 have fully functioning screens for their rear-facing cameras mounted in the centre console in lieu of a rear-view mirror, too, which developer Evolution captured exquisitely. Even little touches like the custom door-opening sequences, tailored to the configuration of the exterior and interior door handles, go a long way in making these rides feel real in a way racing games rarely manage. They sound exceptional too; Gran Turismo could learn a lot from this example.

It’s strange that the car list is so heavily biased towards European models, though; almost exclusively so, in fact. There’s actually only a single American car – the Hennessey Venom GT – and even that’s really just a Texas-built powerplant shipped over to the UK and manhandled into a modified Lotus Exige. More bafflingly, there are no Japanese cars at all. No doubt there’s some great stuff in Driveclub, including some properly amazing, lesser-known models that even the completely stacked Gran Turismo series is still omitting. But car lovers are nothing if not tribal, and this surprisingly insular day-one vehicle roster is going to rustle some jimmies.

Performance upgrades and tuning aren’t featured, although visual customisation is. It’s not a completely freeform livery editor like the one found in the Forza series, however; it’s more like Grid Autosport, where you choose from a bunch of pre-set patterns, icons and numbers. I find all three distracting and garish;  flaming eight-balls look pretty daft on the side of anything. You can turn all these elements off if you want, or just race in a factory colour, but even in single-player races you’re still going to find yourself pitted against a bunch of dorky-looking lime-green AI Ferraris covered in more stickers than a child’s bicycle.

Aside from our cars, we’re afforded some basic driver avatar customisation, too. There’s not a great deal more to it than there is in the likes of, say, PGR4 – choose a gender and select from a bunch of preset heads and shirts – but it feels like a sensible touch giving us some elementary control over what we look like behind the wheel, whether we stand up to pee or not.

At any rate, while the garage is almost entirely Euro-centric for now, its racing locations are much less so. Tracks in Scotland and Norway are joined by routes across Canada, India, and Chile. As immaculately detailed as the cars are, I think Driveclub’s tracks are doubly breathtaking. Postcard-perfect trackside vistas stretch for miles, but they’re just as capable of standing up to close scrutiny, from the individual stones in the road surface to the barely perceptible wiggle of a tautly stretched corner flag. The attention to detail is truly admirable; check out the plastic bags and Driveclub pamphlets wafting across the roads, and the multi-coloured butterflies doing the same thing. The arcade nature has brought with it a forcefield of sorts that will ricochet you away from rocky verges, clumped snow, and protruding guard rails and prevents us from interacting much with anything beyond the asphalt. But stuff like this, combined with the incredibly realistic lighting, really helps make the tracks feel alive.

Most of the routes are quite skinny too, which makes passing without contact a bit tricky but contributes to an excellent sense of speed. Driveclub features a few dedicated, fictional race circuits, though next to scenic blasts through sun-baked Indian scrubland and icy, Scandinavian tunnels, they feel quite boring.

Perhaps as a side-effect of the narrow roads, the racing can tend to be quite aggressive; AI cars have a habit of blitzing past you suddenly and at great speed, and more than once I was poleaxed out of contention with just a corner or two to go. There’s no mechanical damage, but there is a speed-retarding penalty system for harsh collisions. It doesn’t seem to apply to the AI, only to us, and it’s annoyingly inconsistent. Sometimes a slight tap when going two wide on a corner will trigger it, yet a massive shunt will go unnoticed. It’s irritating and caused me a few restarts, but thankfully wasn’t too common.

A single-player progression system breaks up the racing with time trials and drift events. I quite enjoy the former; hotlapping against ghosts can become pretty compulsive.

Of course, as with many of 2014’s big-ticket racers, connectivity is part of Driveclub’s key shtick – and it works well. Every track is po[CENSORED]ted with face-off challenges for us to try and beat in the process of racing or hotlapping: smash a friend’s (or stranger’s) average speed, drift score, or the like on a marked segment of track, and you’ll be rewarded with XP. Participate in (or create and share) custom challenge events, and you’ll be rewarded with XP based on your spot on the ladder when the challenge expires. I had a bunch of these challenges on the boil at a time, and by ranking decently I had a steady stream of XP accumulating even when I wasn’t playing. I really like this kind of asynchronous multiplayer; it’s much like the Forza series’ Rivals mode.

It’s a good thing these social challenges exist alongside the straightforward multiplayer racing, because it only takes a few days to mostly exhaust Driveclub’s single-player event slate, and that’ll leave you far short of unlocking all 50 cars. A clean and simple interface makes navigating to events and quickly jumping into challenges and pre-packaged multiplayer races extremely uncomplicated.

Joining or creating an online race team of likeminded friends – your “club” – of between two and six players is important too. As rewards are shared among members, and also because five of Driveclub’s cars (including the mental BAC Mono) can only be unlocked by levelling up your club, being part of an active club is beneficial. You won’t be privy to all Driveclub offers playing as a so-called “Free Agent”. (You can’t have the name Pickleweasel, though, because I already took it.) Your individual achievements contribute to your club XP too, although as a part of a club you can also tackle the club-only challenges. They’re much like the individual challenges, and equally fun; each member can attempt the challenge, and the best club effort wins. However, Driveclub is overzealously protective of these precious cars: if you leave the club (or, as I discovered, play when the PSN is down), the cars are locked again.