You will find yourself constantly tweaking the difficulty slider in order to find the right balance, and even then you’re not guaranteed to get what you expect. The AI is Project CARS 2’s biggest failing, as it never feels consistent. Yet on other occasions, especially in the new Rally Cross discipline, the AI would masterfully slide around the dirt tracks in the nastiest of weather. At one point, the historic Curva Parabolica was littered with crashed opponents, forever stuck together just off the track. The weather made for some incredibly tough handling moments, but seeing almost every single opponent spinning and crashing was embarrassing. It’s frustrating to see it struggle to master even basic corners in stormy conditions, with one notable case being a race around Monza in Formula X cars. The AI sometimes makes things special for the wrong reasons, however. Driving around Spa is always special, but there’s an extra layer of depth to this experience. Each circuit looks stunning, with some of my personal favourites represented in all their glory. Every car, from the beginner classes like Ginetta Juniors to the LMP1 monsters of Le Mans, looks and drives like its real-life counterpart, complete with damage modelling and tyre deformities. With nearly two hundred cars and more than sixty locations, each with several track layouts, that gives you some idea of how much work has gone into the game. That realism is carried into the visual side of things, with every car and location mapped down to the finest detail. This is the level of detail on offer here, and it’s way more than anything else I’ve seen in a racing game. When the track gets wet, those levels will change dramatically, and you’ll have to follow the correct line in order to carve out a dry lane for maximum grip in treacherous conditions.
This means that grip levels will constantly shift throughout the course of a race weekend. This will change from lap to lap, thanks to the new physics model that Slightly Mad Studios has implemented, with tyre and track surfaces evolving and changing with the temperature and forces put through them. You can’t simply throw a GT1 car around corners, they’ll bounce and slide like a real 600bhp monster would. Cars don’t violently spin as you simply try to correct a minor slide this time they’re much more responsive and the turning is smoother, although don’t think that this means it’s easy. This is helped by the improved controller handling this time around, with almost all of the kinks ironed out for this second instalment. Races are always fraught with tension as you fight for position, or simply fight to keep your car on the road, and even more so when the weather takes a turn for the worst. Cars squirm under braking going into the first corner, a tight left-hander, and everything kicks off. From twelfth to sixth in a matter of seconds, narrowly avoiding a shower of carbon fibre as two cars tangle up ahead. Out go the lights and the cars spin their wheels on the wet asphalt, my prototype Audi R8 managing to find a little extra grip as I find myself catapulted up the ranks. The red lights come on, engine notes rising above the sound of the torrential downpour one, two, three… The weather is unusually stormy as the sleek LMP900 cars line up on the grid. The stage is Laguna Seca, in a dried up lake bed in central California.
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