As the word is now "on the street", I suspect that the GTR "press" demo will
be impossible to pull back, even when they pull it from the server. Anyway,
doing justice to being a press version, here's my review after a few hours..
Graphics are great! I actually prefer them to the TRD2 demos, even though
they are not (yet) so advanced. To me, the TRD2 graphics are too glossy -
not realistic. The TRD2 graphics are "in your face", whilst the GTR graphics
are just very good for the job.
The sound is great - on par with TRD2.
There are two cars and one track (SPA) in the demo. As for the physics -
very good, but maybe some car setup tweaking is required before a second
opinion is given. I suspect that the car setup (as opposed to physics) has
been dumbed down for the press! Both cars are set up to understeer, making
them quite easy to drive, even in the most realistic mode with all the
driver aids disabled. However, as soon as I light up the rear tyres with too
much power, it is instant spin city in anything over first gear, regardless
of how quick I throw on the opposite lock. To me, this is the most
frustrating aspect of driving the default setups. There is no way that I can
trail brake into corners, or power slide out. I can't even set up a neutral
drift. The only way to drive is smoothly with touch of understeer around the
corners, and no sliding on the exits. This gets a bit boring after a while,
and doesn't make for the GPL/LFS type of control that I was hoping for.
Again, to be fair, I'm no guru at car setups - hopefully someone can help
out here with a better setup.
Now for some more Pros. The force feedback (on my Momo Force) is absolutely
brilliant! It gives me so much more feel for what is happening, quite
literally. You notice it the moment you exit the pit garage for the first
time, as you feel the engine throbbing. The effects over the ripple strips
and sand traps is also totally realistic.
The z axis physics are the best I have come across. You can really feel the
car get light over crests and bump its way over curbs. The FF also helps
here.
I didn't notice any tyre wear, or any aspect of the car warming up. For the
first couple of laps, I put the understeer (and lack of braking force) down
to cold tyres and brakes, but things didnt' seem to change after 20 laps. On
the subject of braking - the default setup has braking force set to 100%,
but its almost impossible to lock up the brakes, except at a dead crawl. As
such, (again noting the default setup), I find that its a very binary sim -
mostly full throttle and full brakes all the time - not so great.
One last negative - again on the handling. The sim doesn't seem to react to
weight transfer very realistically. In order to get around the understeer
problem, I deliberately tried to unbalance the car into the slower corners
by turning the wrong way for a moment then throwing the car into the corner,
but it was still understeering. Even slaloming it in 6th gear on the
straight produces mild understeer, or a sudden, uncontrollable spin.
In summary - I think the sim is fantastic and has a lot of potential - I
can't wait to try again with a decent car setup.
Tim