My favourite racing video games have all the time been arcade-style titles with stylized physics that simulate the sensation of driving quick, relatively than the fact of racing. Outrun 2 and Burnout Paradise are excellent examples which might be extra about driving stylishly, whereas more moderen video games just like the Forza Horizon collection merely offer you a cool automotive and a wonderful highway on which to drive it.

EXOcars isn’t like these video games in its aesthetic or broad strokes, but it surely drives a candy line between realism and enjoyable like my favourite racers. It’s not an ideal sport, but the issues that EXOcars will get proper are so essential to the racing expertise that I’m comfortable to miss its few flaws to take pleasure in its many thrills.

Get In Loser, We’re Going Racing

EXOcars places you within the seat of (you’ll by no means guess) an exocar, a light-weight efficiency machine with a tubular exoskeleton body, huge motor, and open wheels held on with excessive suspension elements. In actual life, exocars present an unmatched power-to-weight ratio (in a four-wheel automobile) that may rival super-car efficiency at a a lot decrease price.

When you’re strapped in, the sport delivers a driving expertise designed for immersion. In VR, exocars are the right automobiles for experiencing high-speed enjoyable. They’re low to the bottom, quick as hell, and their trellis-style physique permits unbelievable sight traces freed from blind spots. I can hear the pebbles putting steel just below my toes, hear the slip and scream of rubber because it transitions from gravel to asphalt and again once more, really feel the vibration of the wheel and motor in our arms (with haptic suggestions enabled). The one factor lacking is the odor of burnt hydrocarbons and the wind in your face, although I assume you would all the time arrange a field fan.

Controls are dealt with by way of both digital/bodily controls, whereby we place our precise arms on the sport’s in-game steering wheel and handbrake, articulating them by way of actions in the actual world, or by conventional stick controls, the place steering, accelerating, and braking are dealt with by way of thumb-sticks and buttons. Both management scheme works properly, although there is a particular added problem when utilizing digital controls.

Visually, the sport may be very good. The automobiles look shiny the place they should, and suitably scuffed and abraded in all the best locations. The environments are pretty, with inventive lighting and clever geometry to most successfully awe us mid-race with set-piece model vistas. The aesthetic sensibility lands someplace between Monster Power drinks’ advertising and marketing and the FIA World Rally Championships. EXOcars additionally enjoyably enables you to customise the exocar with all types of ludicrous wheels, frames, and farings, usually in essentially the most garish of colours.

The sound design is spot on, principally, with a number of caveats. Every thing sounds the way in which it ought to, together with the random screaming eagles that decision out as we crest the height of the mountain course, and the gulls that squawk above the distant sea within the seashore race. Sadly, the motors of those exocars simply don’t sound excellent. They’re monotonous, and the revs usually fail to match my enter. They’re predictable, and much much less visceral than the remainder of the sport.

However essentially the most egregious fake pas is the music. My favourite racing sport soundtracks are the jazzy compositions of Richard Jacques in Metropolis Avenue Racer, or the legendary brightness of Kazumi Totaka’s Wave Race 64 soundtrack. I perceive that musical style is subjective and never each racing sport soundtrack can sound like Ridge Racer 4, however EXOcars’ music feels awfully like a much less profitable Avenged Sevenfold album. For me, “that is gonna be a no, dawg.”

Fortunately, it is easy to close off the in-game soundtrack, which I did after an hour.

Physics within the Lead

The exocars in EXOcars are specced for dual-sport driving; that’s, racing on any floor; tarmac, public roadways, sand, snow, grime, and something in between. The environments within the sport mirror this. You may spin your wheels on mountain paths of crushed gravel, sandy seashores, island cliffs, city streets, and parking garages. On every floor, these automobiles behave otherwise.

When driving over free grime, for instance, I can really feel the wheels slip and the automotive drifts much more simply than it does on the tarmac. On snow and ice, issues are even wilder. The explanation it really works, although, is that these variations are predictable and logical. They make sense. By no means does the automotive really feel random and chaotic. If we spin out, it’s as a result of we over-steered or did one thing silly. If we all of the sudden discover ourselves plunging off a cliff into the briny sea, it’s as a result of we did not learn the highway. And we actually can learn the highway, to search for rocks and berms and variance within the terrain that may both assist or hinder our race in ways in which would infrequently happen in a sport solely involved with simulating a racetrack.

The physics engine is so good that you could load the suspension earlier than a flip, hitting the brakes all of the sudden to provide the entrance wheels added traction as we flip into an apex. You may whip the automotive simply so proper earlier than hitting a leap, in order that while you land, you’re already pointing in a sure route. You may hook the main wheel off the sting of the highway when turning round a nook, utilizing physics to successfully drag the automobile round a nook with out scrubbing an excessive amount of velocity. It feels wonderful!

It is all brilliantly finished. The clear sight traces, the open wheels, the articulating suspension hammering round corners mere toes from our eyeballs, the physics; sitting in an exocar in VR is only a visceral place to be.

Driving Modes

EXOcars’ important single-player mode is “Profession Mode,” a collection of difficult racecourses set within the beforehand talked about assorted environments. Upon selecting a race, you’re positioned based on your talent degree (occasions) in a sure place throughout the world leader-board rankings. The sport then pulls three carefully ranked rival gamers’ ghosts from the rankings and populates our race with these ghosts. So, in impact, you are enjoying single-player mode towards equally expert on-line rivals, relatively than computer-controlled AI rivals as in lots of racing video games’ solo modes.

A few attention-grabbing notes on this mode; the ghost gamers’ exocars are rendered at a distance as stable, opaque fashions. Once they get shut, they flip translucent to not break our sight traces. It’s a small contact, however an clever one. As we enhance within the sport, the sport populates the races with higher ghosts, making certain there’s all the time an thrilling problem. This provides dynamism to a sport mode that may in any other case really feel a bit low-stakes.

Lively multiplayer modes enable us to hitch video games towards random gamers or create video games with our mates. These real-time on-line races embody proximity voice chat and the automobiles have collisions, as a result of rubbin’ is racing, ? There’s additionally a fight multiplayer mode by which gamers can scoop up objects equivalent to homing missiles and velocity boosts, identical to Mario Kart, and deploy these weapons of mass destruction to show rival automobiles into scorched-out piles of ash.

The ultimate possibility is the Event mode, by which gamers can compete to set one of the best occasions in a variety of preset races. XOCUS says that these tournaments will seem over time and can provide gamers the chance to win “actual prizes, equivalent to money rewards, equipment on your VR headset, and extra.” Although I’m unsure how it will really work, it’s one thing to sit up for.

Fender Benders

I discussed in my opening paragraph that not every thing is ideal. Listed below are some issues that trouble me about EXOcars.

Many of the programs are excellently designed and provide loads of visible curiosity, although some are blander than others. These are sometimes spiced up a bit when the time of day modifications to nighttime, or when climate results are added, however a boring monitor is a boring monitor.

Whereas the exocars are cosmetically customizable, the aesthetic choices are considerably restricted. Should you don’t like driving a mud bike by a wall of flaming beer kegs, you might not discover something that appears significantly “cool,” if what I imply.

And whereas I’m unsure how this could influence balancing in multiplayer mode, the automobiles might use some efficiency customization. Because it stands, there’s no solution to tweak your suspension, engine, or efficiency stats. The workforce at XOCUS has laid out a roadmap that mentions (amongst many different issues) {that a} tuning system is coming in December, but it surely’s not right here but.

EXOcars Evaluation – Closing Verdict

The place EXOcars actually excels is in the identical locations that my favourite racing video games have all the time excelled. It supplies a visceral, arcade-y, physics-based expertise filled with the thrilling moments we’re all in search of once we step behind the digital wheel of a race automotive. Like one of the best video games within the style, EXOcars makes you’re feeling like a real-life race automotive driver.

UploadVR makes use of a 5-Star score system for our sport opinions – you’ll be able to learn a breakdown of every star score in our assessment pointers.