Project CARS 2

I'll be straight with you: the first thing I did before even touching a race was dig through the settings menu for twenty minutes, and that alone tells you exactly what kind of game this is. Project CARS 2 is a capital-S sim racer built for people who already know what an anti-roll bar does, and it rewards that knowledge generously. Released in September 2017 by Slightly Mad Studios, it landed with an 84 on Metacritic and remains the series high point, partly because Project CARS 3 swung hard toward arcade territory and alienated the core crowd. The content breadth here is genuinely staggering. Around 180 licensed cars span road machines like the McLaren 720S and Ford GT all the way to LMP1 hybrids, open-wheel Formula Rookie cars, rallycross machinery, and IndyCar hardware. Tracks number 60 unique circuits with over 140 layout variations, covering everything from Spa-Francorchamps and the Nordschleife to Fuji Speedway, Long Beach, and dedicated rallycross venues like Lydden Hill and the Dirtfish track. Career mode alone runs 29 motorsport types across six tiers and five disciplines - open-wheel, GT, prototypes, rallycross, and touring cars - with marquee events including the 24 Hours of Le Mans and the Indy 500. The Custom Race builder lets you assemble virtually any combination of cars, circuits, and conditions before you even start a career, which is where the toybox magic really kicks in. Set it to rain on one side of Silverstone and stay dry on the other, because the LiveTrack 3.0 system models exactly that kind of localized, evolving track surface. Now, the hardware talk, because it matters a lot here. On a quality racing wheel with force feedback, this game genuinely competes with anything on the market. The physics model uses a proprietary tire simulation running at up to 200hz, and with assists stripped away you will feel every kerb, every tire temperature change, every shift in grip as weather rolls through. It is absorbing in a way that few racing games manage. On a gamepad, the picture is murkier. Controller support improved over the first game, but multiple reviewers and community voices consistently flag that certain cars feel disconnected and that spinning out without warning remains a real frustration without stability control engaged. My honest advice: leave ABS and traction control on at first, work your way up from slower machinery, and resist the temptation to throw yourself into a Formula car on lap one. The AI is the other known rough edge. Difficulty can swing wildly between series, and some players have reported grinding a single race for hours at default settings only to lap the field easily in the next event. Post-launch patches helped, but the inconsistency never fully went away. The driving line assist also has reliability issues on certain circuits. For the online crowd, multiplayer supports up to 32 players with a dedicated Online Championships mode, though the servers have thinned over the years given the game was delisted from digital storefronts in September 2022 when car and track licenses expired. If you own a copy, you can still play it fine - but new digital purchases are no longer straightforward, so factor that into your decision right now. For the Saturday-night crew asking "is this fun for a group session" - honestly, it depends on the group. Solo sim fans with a wheel will lose entire weekends to the Custom Race builder. Casual players who just want to jump in and feel fast should look at something more forgiving. There is no split-screen mode to speak of, so couch co-op is off the table. What Project CARS 2 offers instead is one of the deepest solo and online motorsport sandboxes ever put on PC, with a discipline variety that nothing else in the sim space has really matched.

Riley · Scout Team

Sports & racing

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