I sincerely want to like the idea behind the game, and it does get some points from me for partially realizing that idea.
It is, at its heart, an arcade racing game, set in an unequivocally gorgeous setting, with an absolute metric ton of cars that can be customized to your heart's desire. The challenges are fun, and it offers great difficulty customization depending on your skill.
It looks and plays great. The problems lie in EVERYTHING else that this game is trying to be. It is NOT a good story game. It is NOT a fun story game. It is NOT a TDU-style life sim. It is NOT an edgy wacky racer game.
Each and every character in this game is so frustratingly boring, so annoying and pretentious, that I (at times) wished I could just take the heaviest car possible and drive all over them so that they would shut the fuck up. There's so many unskippable bullshit cutscenes at each and every story beat, where these pretentious corpo drones are spewing minutes upon minutes of garbage script, all heavily embellished with terrible jokes that still stink of last day's conversation by the office watercooler.
To make things worse, the cutscenes are mostly unskippable, so God save your soul if you wish to just relax and have a nice race somewhere - no no - you have to sit through this absolute garbage storyline that serves absolutely ZERO purpose just to race around the track for 3 laps.
It is, at its heart, an arcade racing game, set in an unequivocally gorgeous setting, with an absolute metric ton of cars that can be customized to your heart's desire. The challenges are fun, and it offers great difficulty customization depending on your skill.
It looks and plays great. The problems lie in EVERYTHING else that this game is trying to be. It is NOT a good story game. It is NOT a fun story game. It is NOT a TDU-style life sim. It is NOT an edgy wacky racer game.
Each and every character in this game is so frustratingly boring, so annoying and pretentious, that I (at times) wished I could just take the heaviest car possible and drive all over them so that they would shut the fuck up. There's so many unskippable bullshit cutscenes at each and every story beat, where these pretentious corpo drones are spewing minutes upon minutes of garbage script, all heavily embellished with terrible jokes that still stink of last day's conversation by the office watercooler.
To make things worse, the cutscenes are mostly unskippable, so God save your soul if you wish to just relax and have a nice race somewhere - no no - you have to sit through this absolute garbage storyline that serves absolutely ZERO purpose just to race around the track for 3 laps.