through its many, many pain points and rough edges, it still ends up telling a great narrative with some really compelling characters. really fun environment too. when you finish the missions up in north algonquin they start introducing a deluge of faceless mafia or government goons to give you missions for the rest of the game and that's honestly my only real "issue" with the game as it were... why should i care about this revolving door of characters who will probably die at the end of their mission line to set up the next one anyway? then the game ends completely unceremoniously. you're winner.

i felt like i hated this game a lot of the time i was playing it but there was just something always bringing me back to get some more mission progress and just explore such a beautiful city (when they have the colour grading turned down) every day for the ~2 weeks it took me to beat it. i'm absolutely sure my feelings would sour towards it if i played it again but the first part of this game, sans the introductory few missions, is just the pure perfection of open-world gaming, especially when you're settling into the mechanics. maybe that's just because they don't make you do any close quarters non-cover combat until algonquin?

The driving is not hard and anyone who complained about it should be banned from reviewing games forever.

made by most of the same people as juiced before they broke off to form juice games and you can really tell, especially visually. feels like it has to be the same lighting tech and environment building methods (in a more primitive form). honestly it looks kinda cute in-game sometimes but the menus are about as dissonant and unrefined as the first juiced but it doesn't matter when you barely use them.

but at least in juiced even if it felt kinda like driving a barge at times there was never really a point where i felt like i was fighting the game. in gtc africa, there's never a point where you aren't. steering response time is abysmal (at least half a second) and when it finally gets going you usually enter into a weightless slide and have to fight to exit the corner.

this isn't so bad in the first half of the game where you have really easy opponents and wide tracks with generous runoffs, but the back half starts slimming down all the tracks and then decides to start putting debri on corner entries/exits and even the apexes sometimes for some arcane reason

and if you hit them, you're probably done for (at least for the race). i spent most of my time in the end of the game trying to work out how the ai worked cause there wasn't much else to do in 20 consecutive 8-10 minute races, and i still have no clue. only thing i CAN tell you is if you fall into last place it's a nightmare to get back in the points, and the ai difficulty seems entirely based on what track you're driving and maybe even how fast you get off the line? but there's definitely some sort of rubberbanding in place; you can force them into walls and they'll find their way back in a lap or so.

at least the career structure allows you to lose a fair amount, it's all championship format (10 fairly short races each for the first 2, 20 endurance races for the last) so you can build a lead and not have to care so much for the next 2 hours worth of racing. unfortunately all you get for beating the last championship is a jpeg and no unlocks.

i don't think i'd recommend this to anyone honestly but if you do play it i at least want you to know that there's no value in the back half and you're torturing yourself for nothing. the only reason i stuck with it for so long is i was in awe at the car list honestly, you get the normal rally staples of the time (focus, cosworth, the lancer/impreza), and then they just stick a bunch of early 2000s american fodder in there to pad it out. it took an embarrassing amount of time for the novelty of driving pontiac vibes and ford cougars to wear off for me.

Dont play the game. They lasted a year after this before making the most underrated extreme sports game ever (Rolling) and then imploding