No Middle Ground with Next Car Game
By granderojo 1 Comments
Often times you hear racing games garner praise for approaching a “good” middle ground of arcade style racing and simulation racing. In terms of the feel of the speed, momentum, torque, handling and acceleration of racing games there is no middle ground. You either do it very well or you don’t do it at all. The difference in being successful with the arcade, simulation and simcade subgenres are paramount, requiring unique approaches in each circumstance. Next Car Game, in it’s current build, feels American in it’s style of approach. Which is ironic to say since it’s developed by Bugbear from Helsinki in Finland. There's a small town feel that is reminiscent of the time my father and I would go see together to watch amateurs race that Bugbear has tapped into.
Even in its early Alpha state the cars have a wonderful pull around turns and inversely, if you approach your line improperly the game has just the right amount of push to punish you. This balance makes the cars in the game feel powerful in a way that past Bugbear games haven’t, or most racing games for that matter. Not since F1 2012 have cars felt so powerful and muscular for me. This is a direction that Gran Turismo decided not to go in after A-Spec, and why I haven’t liked that series since.
They attempted to strike a balance and do it all, instead of sticking to what they did good and refined it. Honestly this game feels so great that I hope it goes free-to-play, even though I paid for an early access copy. PC racing audience is a fickle bunch, with the vast majority of racing fans being on the consoles it might be worth it to approach this game like World of Tanks. It already has the same menu interface, which makes me hopeful that it will go free-to-play. Being freely available might extend the life of the game and grow the base of the audience on PC, doing what Trackmania did before it and avoiding the disaster of a lack of a player-base Trackmania 2 is now stuck with.
At the moment with the alpha, my impressions also lead me to think that the damage modeling might be a bit too intense. Which makes sense, aside from dorks like me who get into the feel of the driving, that's the real back of the box selling point. If it were possible maybe to reduce it on circuits a tad that would be the real sweet spot. But at the moment I would tell Bugbear to keep doing what they're doing, because regardless of this quibble, they're on the right track.
