fucking hell
Driveclub for years - like many racing games - merely existed on my periphery, alongside games like The Crew, Project Cars and Assetto Corsa. Just one of those realistic looking racing games I'd never touch. Then for some reason this year I caught the racing game bug. I started watching videos on the best 7th and 8th gen racing games. After buying some old PS3 ones, I tried searching for contemporary racers that I missed out on. Driveclub looked like the one that made salivate the most. And after playing it, it makes me salivate even more.
Racing games come in many flavours. There is no single serving, all-in-one comprehensive racing game. You gotta pick and choose which ones push your most buttons and satisfy you best. Do you want realistic physics and tuning; do you want circuit racing or street racing; do you want a extensive car list or a detailed one; do you want arcade settings or sim settings; etc, etc..
Driveclub for me fits in that perfect intersection between arcade and sim. It looks realistic. There are circuit tracks, but the environments are kind of quaint and isolated, like slithers of open world sections. The cars are all glossy and mostly sporty, but they're not GT performance cars. There's no real customization; no body mods or car tuning. They don't require knowledge of tyre grips to fly across tight tracks but they're not as loose and floaty as arcade cars. It's basically Sony's Forza Horizon. It's just about everything I want in a racing/driving game and yet it makes me mournful that it could be so much more. Playing it in 2024 is kind of heartbreaking since it's been offline for 4 years now and I'm pretty sure you can't even buy it digitally any more. None of the DLC is available. It's like a ghost town of a game.
But what a beautiful ghost town it is. As nerdy and irrelevant as it is to talk about, you can't talk about Driveclub without talking about weather and particle effects. The dynamic environments in this game are what I love so much. Like, yes, it's missing the physics and tuning modifications to make it an actual driving simulator, but no other game has ever made me feel so relaxed behind a virtual steering wheel and made me in awe of racing as this game has. Watching the sun go down and the stars come out, the subtle change of colours as your car's red lights come out to shine in the dark of night to end the race. The way the rain evolves, the lightning comes out, the little raindrops reacting realistically on your windshield. The little plastic bags floating across the track; or the flower petals, or dirt; the little bits of smoke alongside the sides of the track. None of these things are amazing particularly on their, but when combined with a photorealistic idyllic background and glossy sportscar, it just creates the most zen racing experience I've ever had. It's such a shame the studio closed and the game died and they got a chance to really iterate on this core concept and evolve and perfect it into some truly spectacular. A genuine "what could have been?" game but for what's here I'm still incredibly impressed. It feels like playing gaming's most comprehensive demo before the game got cancelled.
I hope someone can make another game like this again, although the way gaming has evolved, the way game budgets have ballooned out and racers have become more and more out of flavour, it seems unlikely. This will sit as a weird little PS4 exclusive curiosity until then, I guess. An S-tier racing game.
Driveclub for years - like many racing games - merely existed on my periphery, alongside games like The Crew, Project Cars and Assetto Corsa. Just one of those realistic looking racing games I'd never touch. Then for some reason this year I caught the racing game bug. I started watching videos on the best 7th and 8th gen racing games. After buying some old PS3 ones, I tried searching for contemporary racers that I missed out on. Driveclub looked like the one that made salivate the most. And after playing it, it makes me salivate even more.
Racing games come in many flavours. There is no single serving, all-in-one comprehensive racing game. You gotta pick and choose which ones push your most buttons and satisfy you best. Do you want realistic physics and tuning; do you want circuit racing or street racing; do you want a extensive car list or a detailed one; do you want arcade settings or sim settings; etc, etc..
Driveclub for me fits in that perfect intersection between arcade and sim. It looks realistic. There are circuit tracks, but the environments are kind of quaint and isolated, like slithers of open world sections. The cars are all glossy and mostly sporty, but they're not GT performance cars. There's no real customization; no body mods or car tuning. They don't require knowledge of tyre grips to fly across tight tracks but they're not as loose and floaty as arcade cars. It's basically Sony's Forza Horizon. It's just about everything I want in a racing/driving game and yet it makes me mournful that it could be so much more. Playing it in 2024 is kind of heartbreaking since it's been offline for 4 years now and I'm pretty sure you can't even buy it digitally any more. None of the DLC is available. It's like a ghost town of a game.
But what a beautiful ghost town it is. As nerdy and irrelevant as it is to talk about, you can't talk about Driveclub without talking about weather and particle effects. The dynamic environments in this game are what I love so much. Like, yes, it's missing the physics and tuning modifications to make it an actual driving simulator, but no other game has ever made me feel so relaxed behind a virtual steering wheel and made me in awe of racing as this game has. Watching the sun go down and the stars come out, the subtle change of colours as your car's red lights come out to shine in the dark of night to end the race. The way the rain evolves, the lightning comes out, the little raindrops reacting realistically on your windshield. The little plastic bags floating across the track; or the flower petals, or dirt; the little bits of smoke alongside the sides of the track. None of these things are amazing particularly on their, but when combined with a photorealistic idyllic background and glossy sportscar, it just creates the most zen racing experience I've ever had. It's such a shame the studio closed and the game died and they got a chance to really iterate on this core concept and evolve and perfect it into some truly spectacular. A genuine "what could have been?" game but for what's here I'm still incredibly impressed. It feels like playing gaming's most comprehensive demo before the game got cancelled.
I hope someone can make another game like this again, although the way gaming has evolved, the way game budgets have ballooned out and racers have become more and more out of flavour, it seems unlikely. This will sit as a weird little PS4 exclusive curiosity until then, I guess. An S-tier racing game.