fucking hell

Driveclub for years - like many racing games - merely existed on my periphery, alongside games like The Crew, Project Cars and Assetto Corsa. Just one of those realistic looking racing games I'd never touch. Then for some reason this year I caught the racing game bug. I started watching videos on the best 7th and 8th gen racing games. After buying some old PS3 ones, I tried searching for contemporary racers that I missed out on. Driveclub looked like the one that made salivate the most. And after playing it, it makes me salivate even more.

Racing games come in many flavours. There is no single serving, all-in-one comprehensive racing game. You gotta pick and choose which ones push your most buttons and satisfy you best. Do you want realistic physics and tuning; do you want circuit racing or street racing; do you want a extensive car list or a detailed one; do you want arcade settings or sim settings; etc, etc..

Driveclub for me fits in that perfect intersection between arcade and sim. It looks realistic. There are circuit tracks, but the environments are kind of quaint and isolated, like slithers of open world sections. The cars are all glossy and mostly sporty, but they're not GT performance cars. There's no real customization; no body mods or car tuning. They don't require knowledge of tyre grips to fly across tight tracks but they're not as loose and floaty as arcade cars. It's basically Sony's Forza Horizon. It's just about everything I want in a racing/driving game and yet it makes me mournful that it could be so much more. Playing it in 2024 is kind of heartbreaking since it's been offline for 4 years now and I'm pretty sure you can't even buy it digitally any more. None of the DLC is available. It's like a ghost town of a game.

But what a beautiful ghost town it is. As nerdy and irrelevant as it is to talk about, you can't talk about Driveclub without talking about weather and particle effects. The dynamic environments in this game are what I love so much. Like, yes, it's missing the physics and tuning modifications to make it an actual driving simulator, but no other game has ever made me feel so relaxed behind a virtual steering wheel and made me in awe of racing as this game has. Watching the sun go down and the stars come out, the subtle change of colours as your car's red lights come out to shine in the dark of night to end the race. The way the rain evolves, the lightning comes out, the little raindrops reacting realistically on your windshield. The little plastic bags floating across the track; or the flower petals, or dirt; the little bits of smoke alongside the sides of the track. None of these things are amazing particularly on their, but when combined with a photorealistic idyllic background and glossy sportscar, it just creates the most zen racing experience I've ever had. It's such a shame the studio closed and the game died and they got a chance to really iterate on this core concept and evolve and perfect it into some truly spectacular. A genuine "what could have been?" game but for what's here I'm still incredibly impressed. It feels like playing gaming's most comprehensive demo before the game got cancelled.

I hope someone can make another game like this again, although the way gaming has evolved, the way game budgets have ballooned out and racers have become more and more out of flavour, it seems unlikely. This will sit as a weird little PS4 exclusive curiosity until then, I guess. An S-tier racing game.

At its core, it's a solid arcade racer, probably the last of the closed circuit, scenic track styled arcade games, reminds me a lot of the PGR series and earlier NFS titles. Beautiful locations, pretty cars and particle effects that give it a cinematic feels make it still stand out 8 years later, few racing games look this good and some of the sensations it transmits through visuals are still unmatched.

But sadly, as of 2022 it's merely a shell of what it hints to have been in its best days. A lot of dlc cars and events, and even a whole expansion with bikes and a VR mode are locked as unobtainable dlc (both paid and free) after the online was killed and then the game delisted.

Sony just keeps fucking over their future players with online-locked content for some reason with games they don't even plan to support long term (looking at you, gravity rush 2), and with no EOL patches or physical complete releases. Games seen as throwaway cashgrabs by a publisher that sees its studios as throwaway subsidiaries.

for some insane reason I've seen an uptick in people saying that driveclub was Good Actually. out of all the games this usually happens with this one is the most baffling. even back when the servers were up and the game was firing on all cylinders with all its social stuff driveclub sucked. the main draw for this was the Club aspect of Driving and it just meant sometimes in a match you'd see your friends pfp and have a drift challenge or something pop up. and also there was a facebook style timeline on the main menu to show you your friends Achievements. despite all the social elements being so heavily emphasized in the marketing (and in the name of the game) none of it is any more meaningful or complex then what you see in forza horizon or even autolog when nfs was doing that. the game outside the social aspect is just junk too. the tracks are boring, the driving model feels broken, the graphics honestly aren't even that good. they're technically impressive but usually just really flat. I don't know what it is about evolution studios in particular but people do this with every one of their games. actually the motorstorm games were pretty sick. man driveclub was ssooo underrated. why didn't people give onrush a chance!!!

Evolution Studio's swan song.
It had a rocky launch but the devs continued to support the game through updates for two years until the studio's closure. Those updates were some of the best post-release content I have seen that rivals No Mans Sky such as an amazing weather system, different physics, rich set of events, vehicles and tracks.
It has a good blend of arcade and simulation racing that it becomes incredibly fun and thrilling with its great sense of speed and lovely car selection.
The whole game is so beautiful that only Gran Turismo can rival its looks. The sound design is also near realistic and the soundtrack is amazing. But despite all these, there lingers some of its flaws from the original release, inconsistent difficulty and ruthless AI that don't care about your presence.

On release, Driveclub is nothing special. Driveclub at its final update to its death is the "Snyder cut" that makes it one of the most underrated racing games. A type of racing game that probably won't be replicated again. (Project Cars 3 tried but couldn't. It even had devs from this game.) Gran Turismo 7 and Forza 8 are coming out but what also we need is another Driveclub like game.