An absolute disaster, genuinely.

Why would you want to play this. It has nothing, and I mean nothing, from the original games that you love. It doesn't do enough to stand on it own. The characters are dull and forgettable, the story is dull and forgettable, the gameplay is dull and forgettable. The game tries so hard to take itself seriously and sell its player on its world and its characters and its charm but it completely falls flat at every single turn.

An astonishingly bad game.

This is depressing. There is nothing here. It's empty. Lifeless. Pointless. A reminder of the bleak, meaningless nature of existence itself. While it didn't immediately feel nearly as bad due to the fact that it isn't downright insulting, this game reminds me a lot of DIRT 5, but its soulless nature also reminds me a bit of Forza Motorsport 7. Flashy effects and annoying announcers, terrible handling model that's heavy, slow, slippery, needlessly punishing at times and impossible to go wrong at others, and unable to decide whether or not grip or drift is what it wants to be, made even worse by having a huge input delay on steering with a controller, a sense of speed so incredibly poor that 150 miles per hour feels like 50, brain dead AI, basically no music, sound design that can only be described as adequate, absolutely no motivation to play the game since the entire "career" is just a list of events to do in any order, so little care for player immersion that the game doesn't even ask for your name, nor does it even make you aware that you have a team, numbers flashing on the screen to constantly reward the player for doing anything at all - even just shifting gears - because modern games apparently need to be that way, a level system that functionally does nothing except feed the player constant micro-achievements for nothing, content prominently visible on the career menu that's locked behind DLC and only directs you to the store page... I could feel my soul dying as I played this. I did three races and uninstalled the game, then sat around feeling sad for a while. Not just sad that I played it, sad that it exists. The overwhelming nothingness provided by this game caused me to go outside and stare at the sun just to feel again. Nothing more needs to be said about this.

(from my web zone: https://kerosyn.link/i-played-every-codemasters-racing-game-to-prove-a-point/#grid-2019)