a decent first act and a painful 5 hours after that. the commitment to "truer" physics-based driving is good on paper, but it feels like they got too excited and put the spring rate as low as they could. fine when you're in San Diego, tolerable through most of Paris, unplayable trying to worm your way around right angles in Tokyo

at first i was honestly really excited for the course design compared to MC3, giving you more choices in route than just shortcuts, but it just adds so much more trial and error in route planning (that damned Enigma race...) in a series already kinda renowned for its restart counts.

if it was just one issue, just the course design, just the handling, just the traffic, i'd easily recommend this to anyone alongside 3. but the truth is that they all feed into each other in such a way where almost every race has more dread attached to it than the satisfaction of "solving the puzzle". even in the late-game, you see those flashes of inspired course design come up, but it just isn't enough to offset it for me