In summary, GTR2 offers a more polished package than it did last year, with the most notable improvements being a seriou
Some of the improvements seem to be mainly spin-based marketing. For instance, we are promised "34 different track variations" with no mention whatsoever of how many actual tracks this means. In reality, there are less than a dozen tracks -- the same official FIA tracks included in last year's game -- but by using various combinations of track layouts at a particular circuit, the company now claims almost triple the number of layouts to race upon. It's a classic case of being technically truthful, but nevertheless misleading, by the marketers.
Also, 144 cars are promised; however, they count the same car on different teams as if they are unique cars. So you don't really get 144 different cars; you actually get 25 different real-life licensed car types. This is no small achievement, so it's a mystery why Simbin would feel the need to inflate their car count to compete with console titles like Gran Turismo and Forza Motorsport.
Like its predecessor, GTR 2 has three racing modes: novice, semi-pro and professional. For the first time this year, however, you get a racing school mode to help racing newbies learn the ins and outs of racing the various FIA GT cars around the circuits. If you've played the Gran Turismo series on the Playstation, you would find this mode similar to the license trials in that game. You are given tasks to train for and complete, such as braking, accelerating, following the correct racing line, and doing track laps against a ghost instructor car. Completing these trials will unlock tracks and championships in the game.
The basic 2003 and 2004 FIA GT series championships are supplemented by additional 'custom' championships, which are made progressively available throughout the game. These custom championships begin with relatively short and easy single-make races, and graduate to longer and more challenging events. In addition, there are endurance events up to and including 24 hours in duration. These can be time-scaled or raced in real-time, and you can even take turns with a skilled AI driver to give you a rest when your muscles start to ache or the eyestrain takes its toll (or your significant other demands you get off the computer for a change!)
As was the case last year, this is a full hardcore simulation and is compatible with the MoTec telemetry software. Unlike last year, it does not ship with the software, but this can be downloaded from the manufacturer's website at no charge. It takes a little fiddling to get the telemetry configuration set up properly, which is annoying. It was nicer to have it working out of the box.
Graphically, the game has been given a major facelift and come off about twice as good as last year's. The cars are incredibly detailed, to the point that, unless closely inspected, a screenshot could be mistaken for a photograph. The track and curbs are richly detailed with high-resolution textures that show convincing real-life wear and tear. As usual, it is mainly the distant trackside objects that reveal some of the chinks in the armor and remind you that this is still a game. But where the action is, the track and its immediate vicinity, the graphics are incredibly realistic. This comes at a price, of course. On anything less than a top-of-the-line PC, you will need to dial back some of this eye candy to keep the frame rate high enough for responsive racing.
If there is a disappointment with the graphics, it's that the frame rate is inconsistent from track to track. Tuning your PC for a great frame rate in Barcelona might subject you to a stuttering mess at Spa-Francorchamps. It would have been nice to be able to set the graphics once and forget about them.
Unlike most console racers, GTR 2 puts itself well above Forza and Gran Turismo by giving you a full 3D cockpit interior. Full working instrument clusters, very accurate interiors, side and overhead mirrors make each car unique in more than just sound and performance. Track-IR peripherals are supported for live head panning, and if you aren't lucky enough to have one of these, a 'look to apex' slider will allow you to look into and through each corner from within the 3D cockpit.
One notable effect is sun flare, which will nearly blind you as you drive into it. The sun changes location as it rises and sets in 24-hour races, which adds a sense of authenticity even as it annoys you with its realism. The sounds are every bit as good as last year, if not slightly better. You can individually tune engine sounds, skid sounds, and the sounds of other cars around you. In general, the sound remains very authentic, and it is hard to find any room for improvements. One of the problems with hardcore racing simulations is that they tend to "preach to the choir", so to speak. These products fill a small but passionate niche of the market for hardcore enthusiasts. Nevertheless, there's always a desire to expand this audience, and the racing school mode of the game aims to attract new players and get them up to speed. The game does an acceptable job of this, and might help ease some players into the game. However, the fact remains that when you get out of training and try to race, the game can get a little frustrating for the uninitiated. This is due to the trial-and-error nature of finding the right skill level, and the confusing user interface.
You can set the difficulty level as a percentage of reality. But there's also a difficulty level for the championships that is independent of this slider. So you may enter a championship marked 'easy', but if your difficulty slider is set at 100% you will face some extremely challenging opponents. Setting a slider for one race didn't guarantee a consistent challenge from track to track. I left the field of competitors in my dust at Barcelona, but couldn't keep up with them in Magny Cours, France. Qualifying is also strange. When qualifying at Barcelona, I was last on the time charts, but, as I mentioned, I blew right by them in the race. This is an important issue, because racing is only fun for most people when they have other cars to fight with. Being half a track ahead of or behind the field is indistinguishable from pounding out boring solo laps. As a result, I spent an inordinate amount of time adjusting the difficulty sliders to find a setting that would keep me in the midst of a fight for the entire race, and it was quite difficult to accomplish.
Still, dicing with AI in the race is fantastic. There are several settings for aggression levels of the AI. You can go clean conservative AI or nasty aggressive AI. There is a 'realistic' level of aggressiveness that I nonetheless found too aggressive, judging from the number of times I got rear-ended under braking or nudged off the road when side-by-side. I reduced the setting to 'clean' and this felt about right. GTR 2 lived up to my memories of the first version of the game by giving me a good enough AI that I didn't feel the need to forego single player and rush to the Internet for multiplayer racing.
Online play is well integrated into the game. As with last year, you can access online folders of car setups from within the game, download and use them, and rate them for others to see. And then there is the multiplayer racing. In my review of last year's title, I criticized the net code of that product, which was in fact the same code as EA's F1 series of sims (which were basically unusable online). This time around, I was able to locate an 18-person race and see that the net code is much improved. I had no technical problems here. As for the actual racing, I was disappointed to find the same idiots who wreck public online sim racing there in full force. Passing a slower car, I was deliberately wrecked by someone who then purposely turned around to hit me again. Can't we get this lot to leave GTR and instead spoil the Need for Speed multiplayer games? However, the idiocy of some online gamers does not take anything away from the quality of the software itself, and I fully expect to see leagues of quality opponents established on the Internet. I intend to find one myself in the near future, so if you're running a league of serious and clean racers, drop me a line!
GTR 2's telemetry and garage setups are very similar to the way they were last year. If there is something you can tune in the real world, chances are it is to be found in the game….somewhere.
This brings me to the user interface, which is easily the biggest black mark on this title. It is one thing to fumble around trying to figure out where the right buttons and options are during the first few hours of play. It's quite another to be in the same situation many hours later. Having rows and columns of buttons seemingly arbitrarily placed and with no regard whatsoever for common sense is just inexcusable. At some points, you'll have four rows of buttons on the screen, all black with white text, and with no sense of context to help you figure out which button is appropriate to the task at hand.
This has consequences beyond just aesthetics. In my first championship race, I had finished qualifying and wanted to put just enough fuel into the car to finish the race. Unfortunately, the game did an excellent job of hiding the number of remaining laps, since the slider that set that information had disappeared. I later realized that because the race was specified in time and not laps that I hadn't read it correctly. Eventually I found the option that let me specify race distance in laps so I could see the race distance correctly and set fuel accordingly. But trying to figure out how many 1:50 laps would fit into a 45 minute race is not enjoyable. I ended up running low on fuel, pitting from the lead, and finishing 18th. In short, I wasted 45 minutes with no points to show for it, all due to a poor user interface that made it difficult to find what I needed when I needed it most
The information is there, but the user interface overall is poorly laid out, difficult to navigate, and generally confusing and cluttered. GTR aficionados will endure this to get to the racing, but less passionate users might be put off by it.
Hot lap replays are automatically saved, and you can save your race replays as well. The screenshots accompanying this review were all taken from replays. The only thing about the otherwise superb replay system is that you can't save anything into a file if it's not part of a race. There were some amazing wrecks in practice sessions I would have loved to capture, but there was no way to save them since they were neither in-race incidents, nor in a hot lap.
The game fully supports force feedback, as it did last year. However, I found that with my Logitech Driving Force Pro wheel (with 900 degrees of lock), I was less than satisfied with the varying spring forces. The wheel would go slack well before my front tires lost grip, causing me to stop turning the wheel, only to discover that the car was actually still cornering. I was robbing myself of faster times until I became conditioned to ignore the feedback from the wheel and just keep pushing until I could see and hear that the car was plowing ahead.
That notwithstanding, the physics are excellent and will challenge experienced sim racers, while Simbin provides aids like traction control and ABS brakes as options. How realistic is it? Well, I haven't driven a real FIA GT car, but the reactions of the car, for the most part, matched what my real-life racing experience has taught me to expect. I don't think that the hardcore sim fans will be disappointed. This is a game made by simulation fanatics, for simulation fanatics.
Closing Comments