This is probably the most popular mod for Assetto Corsa and I’ve wanted to play around with it for some time now. The system requirements are quite significant however so I put it off until I’d upgraded my PC. Now that I’ve done so, I thought I’d also put in the work to make this 10-year old game look as good as it possibly can. This means finally getting around to buying Pure, installing a new pp filter and even getting the right custom shaders patch settings. I can’t honestly say that it looks like a brand new game but it does make for a drastic graphical improvement.

For those who need a primer, the Shutoko Revival Project is a mod that implements the highways in and around Tokyo, Japan into Assetto Corsa. It doesn’t include city streets except for some famous landmarks like the Shibuya crossing but with around 160 kilometers of highways, that’s plenty of city driving. Over time, they’ve also improved things like the signage, the buildings that visible, even the bumps and grates on the surface of the roads. There’s a downloadable car pack with period-appropriate vehicles and an optional add-on that together can be used to simulate the presence of traffic, so that you’re not just zooming through an empty city. If you want to race against other players, they also provide multiplayer servers, creating a sort of persistent online world. It’s just an open world to roam around in so there aren’t exactly any formal events but being able to drive around in even a tiny fraction of a real world city holds a lot of appeal to many people, me included.

The team did a great job with the mod but this is an old game and the models aren’t exactly very high resolution. Driving around the Tokyo map, you can see that the textures on the concrete are kind of bland and the office buildings are very blocky. Turn on Pure and a new post-processing filter and well, it’s not like the textures or models can magically become any higher quality. However they do make the light sources more complex and that leads to the textures interacting with the lighting in more interesting ways. That makes the scene visually richer and just look better overall. The difference is very striking as I could easily see even on the older maps that I’ve become very familiar with. Combined with the custom shaders patch settings that I downloaded separately that also improves the look of some of the UI elements, the improvement is vast indeed and makes the driving experience a whole lot more fun.

That’s why in addition to puttering around the Tokyo map, I’ve been busy checking how some of my favorite tracks like Spa-Francorchamps and Mt. Akina look under these settings. They all look far better than I remember though I do admit that under certain conditions the graphics look a little too videogamey rather than realistic. Anyway I also briefly popped into the online Shutoko servers to see how they worked and couldn’t notice much of a difference. Most of the time you don’t even see the other players and everyone is just doing their own thing. With that in mind, while the highways are long, it does get boring to just cruise along one side of it. The many blocked off exits give the illusion that the space is much bigger than it really is and of course the layout is nowhere near as interesting or challenging to drive as a race track.

As I write this by pure coincidence, Kunos has just released a trailer for Assetto Corsa EVO, the long awaited sequel to this game. There’s understandably both excitement and skepticism among the player base as the current version has so much mod content that it seems hard to top. For my part, I’m keeping this installed and occasionally turning to it to keep my skills sharp. I’m still mainly interested in rally driving games so this is just a side interest for me. This is a fun mod to play around with it and it’s truly incredible how much work the team put into it. But it is just for fun and probably won’t help you become a better driver.