So this game was free on Ubisoft’s platform for a month recently so I took the chance to snag it. I’ve actually had this on my Steam wishlist for a while now, ever since Tom Chick named it as his game of the year a couple of years back. As is the norm for Chick, this was an unconventional choice and he was duly lambasted for it but I remember being intrigued as he called it the best CarPG ever made. What I didn’t realize is that in additional to its RPG elements, this is also more akin to an MMO than any single-player game. It’s an online-only game that requires you to log onto the servers and you’re constantly sharing the game world with other players. Playing it was certainly a novel experience for me.

First, let’s get the awful stuff out of the way. The story is an embarrassingly bad monstrosity, even by videogame standards. Something about a criminal gang with a nationwide network and you having to infiltrate it to take down a corrupt FBI agent and avenge your assassinated brother. It”s dumb as hell because it involves a good FBI agent somehow condoning you committing all kinds of crimes as part being undercover while the gang, the 5-10s, seem to resolve disputes and gain status exclusively through racing. You can’t just ignore the story missions however. The world is completely open right from the beginning, no artificial walls as in the Grand Theft Auto games, but access to side activities and car shops is gated by story progression, so you’ll have to suck it up. This is easily the worst part of the game.

The best part is the world itself. It’s set in nothing less than the entirety of the continental United States. Obviously this isn’t set at anything close to a realistic scale but it still makes for a huge map. For an idea of how big it is, one of the races in the game, the so-called Landmark Tour, supposedly takes something like three and a half hours to complete. That’s way too long for me to ever contemplate playing but it should convince you that the world is way bigger than anyone could possibly ask for. This map is divided into five zones of roughly increasing difficulty level beginning in the Midwest. Though the game is a couple of years old by now, it looks fantastic to my eyes and I was even surprised by how much animation and detail there is. There are pedestrians in the streets, wildlife in the woods, a complete day-night cycle, a weather system, the works. It’s easily good enough to be a Grand Theft Auto game, except that you never get out of the car.

The world is in fact so pretty that one of my favorite activities is simply to drive around to the various landmarks to tag them while admiring the scenery. I find the variety of the sights to be endlessly diverting. You have the streets of New York, the badlands of Arizona, the wetlands of Florida, the snow-covered peaks of the mountain states, the redwood forests of California and so much more. I especially love driving through slick countryside roads after an afternoon rain. Don’t think that you’re restricted to the roads either. Everywhere is fair game given the right vehicle. You can even reach a mountain peak so high up that you can see clouds floating below you. Each landmark comes with a little blurb of its history that I enjoy reading and sometimes there are some nice Easter Eggs. Visit the launching pad of the Space Shuttle for example, and you can enjoy the sight of a launch. I only regret that it’s impossible to get out of the car and freely move the camera around to get a better view.

The cars themselves look great as you might expect and enough detail to satisfy even the rivet counters. The models show damage as you knock into stuff and it’s great to see sand, snow or dirt stick to the car. The RPG aspect comes in with the fact that each car has eleven slots for different types of equipment, ranging from the tyres to the motorcore to the suspension system. These comes with bonuses that affect stats like speed, acceleration, grip and so on. You earn new parts by doing well in the story missions and especially the skills challenges. Since the parts come in various levels, these affect the overall level of your car, making it a general indicator of how good it is. As you play through the story missions, you gain access to NPC crew members who allow you to spend perk points for various stuff, such as getting discounts on parts or improving the performance of your brakes.

The RPG analogue extends even further when you consider that cars can be specced into what are effectively different classes. Street-spec cars for example are jack of all trades while dirt-spec ones run best on dirt tracks. Circuit-specced cars are crazy fast, but have poor maneuvering and are totally useless when off highways. As you might tell you’ll want to switch to different specs when tackling challenges in different areas of the world. This means you’ll need to effectively work on leveling up multiple configurations and types of cars, which is more work that you might initially think because parts are locked to each spec. If you earn a level 35 tyre for a dirt-spec car for example, that’s only ever available for dirt-spec cars. You actually even have to go to a car tuner to pay to equip that tyre onto another dirt-spec car.

The car physics probably aren’t terribly realistic, but they’re plenty good enough for me. I really love how you can instantly feel the difference between differently specced cars, even if they’re all the same base model. The type of surface and the current weather conditions matter a great deal as well. This translates to tons of fun and I have to confess that I became somewhat addicted to completing as many of the skill challenges as possible. Here are some hints for these: try waiting to them in the daytime as the darkness makes it a lot harder to do most of them; experiment with doing the challenges in different directions, as often you’ll find it much easier to do it one direction than another; and remember if a challenge seems impossible, it may well be until you have a better car or a different set of perks.

My main complaint is that the skill challenges cover a broad range of stuff: speed for example requires you to go as fast as possible for as long as possible while staying on the road; jump means jumping as far as possible using the designated ramp; precision requires moving through a series of gates as quickly as possible and so on. Unfortunately for a game about cars, there seem to be a paucity of actual races. All of the racing events, whether against AI opponents or through fixed checkpoints, happen only in the story missions. There are no races as side activities unless you touch the multiplayer stuff which I didn’t go into at all. It’s a rather perplexing decision.

There are a few other minor quibbles I could mention. The unlockable hidden cars that you obtain don’t seem very exciting being as they are just mostly just differently specced versions of the same model. The developers seem to have a hard on for the Nissan Skyline GT-R since it is a top tier car for almost every spec. And the requirement that you have spend money to equip parts that you have already unlocked on new cars seems to deter experimenting with many different vehicles. It seems to me that you’re really only supposed to focus on specific model for each spec. Finally I really, really hate how story mode missions sometimes force you to use a specific car rather than the best one that you have of the appropriate spec. Story mode is, once again, just awful all around.

Overall however there’s no doubt that I loved this game, as evidenced by how much time I ended up spending with it. I loved driving around and looking at stuff. I loved doing all of the skill challenges and got a great deal of satisfaction out of going back with better cars to old ones and easily getting Platinum on them. I mostly ignored the multiplayer aspect though having other players zipping about doing their thing adds some additional excitement to the world. I only got griefed once by someone who insisted on following me around and colliding with me repeatedly with a Monster-specced truck. All this and I didn’t even have to spend a cent on this. Now that’s a great deal!