Aside from our cars, we’re afforded some basic driver avatar customisation, too.

You can turn all these elements off if you want, or just race in a factory colour, but even in single-player races you’re still going to find yourself pitted against a bunch of dorky-looking lime-green AI Ferraris covered in more stickers than a child’s bicycle.

I find all three distracting and garish flaming eight-balls look pretty daft on the side of anything. It’s not a completely freeform livery editor like the one found in the Forza series, however it’s more like Grid Autosport, where you choose from a bunch of pre-set patterns, icons and numbers. Performance upgrades and tuning aren’t featured, although visual customisation is. But car lovers are nothing if not tribal, and this surprisingly insular day-one vehicle roster is going to rustle some jimmies. No doubt there’s some great stuff in Driveclub, including some properly amazing, lesser-known models that even the completely stacked Gran Turismo series is still omitting. More bafflingly, there are no Japanese cars at all. There’s actually only a single American car – the Hennessey Venom GT – and even that’s really just a Texas-built powerplant shipped over to the UK and manhandled into a modified Lotus Exige. They sound exceptional too Gran Turismo could learn a lot from this example.ĭriveclub looks amazing at night.It’s strange that the car list is so heavily biased towards European models, though almost exclusively so, in fact. Even little touches like the custom door-opening sequences, tailored to the configuration of the exterior and interior door handles, go a long way in making these rides feel real in a way racing games rarely manage. Supercars like the Marussia B2 have fully functioning screens for their rear-facing cameras mounted in the centre console in lieu of a rear-view mirror, too, which developer Evolution captured exquisitely. They’re best enjoyed from inside the cabins, where the attention to detail is so extreme that even the windscreens show those subtle semi-circle scuffs on the glass you get from the wipers when the glare of the sun catches them.

Driveclub’s car selection is nicely curated to represent some of Europe’s most desirable sports cars, grand tourers, supercars and hypercars, plus a smattering of hot hatches as an entry point. The biggest problem I had with it is that the handling’s too sticky to make the drift events much fun I generally found myself getting bogged down mid-corner because it’s surprisingly difficult to maintain momentum. I found it satisfying and entirely in line with Driveclub’s direction, even if it’s a fraction simplistic. Even if the back end does step out it generally only takes a smidge of countersteering to correct it. In keeping with the overall arcade sensibilities, even with a bootful of throttle Driveclub’s high-horsepower hypercars spring from the line with only moderate wheelspin, and they seem mostly reluctant to about-face mid-corner in an orgy of oversteer. The 50 cars in Driveclub brake hard and grip like glue, but the driving model is still nuanced enough to let you feel the difference between a bulky Bentley Continental GT and an eager John Cooper Works-tuned Mini. Play Handling trends towards the arcade side of the spectrum, yet it’s considerably less superficial than something like Burnout.

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