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Driveclub: the Top Gear review | Top Gear

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You wait all year for a decent next-gen racing game, and then four come along all at once. Following The Crew, Forza Horizon 2 and Project Cars, here's Driveclub - a PS4 exclusive from the studio that bought you rather excellent and under-rated Motorstorm.

The game takes place around small clubs, each with no more than six members. Being a member of a club gives you access to special challenges and races, and the success of every individual benefits the club as a whole. So, for example, game director Paul Rustchynsky told TG.com that there are ten cars where once one member wins access to it, the whole club has it. Leave the club, and you lose the car.

From the main menu then, you have a few options. Besides Online, you can dive into Tour mode, or specify a single race, time trial or drift event and set the parameters yourself. There are a fair few races in Tour to keep you busy, and you still earn Fame for you and your club. But so centered on social interaction is Driveclub, that without an internet connection, or indeed any online friends, the game's appeal is severely limited.

So, we head online. In a mechanic similar to the likes of the recent Burnout games, every now and then a challenge will pop up mid-race, encouraging you to beat a random opponent's or a friend's score over a specified piece of track. The score might relate to drifting, or how closely you can stick to the racing line. You're free to ignore them, but they do at least vary the car-to-car action.

These challenges earn you Fame Points - the scoring metric around which Driveclub is based. Mostly, you earn them without really trying. Travelling at high-speed, drafting, drifting and clean overtakes will all net a few hundred at a time - but start wantonly bashing into other drivers or cutting corners, and you may soon find yourself with only a few to your name.

And speaking of clean overtakes, there are 50 cars on the original roster to muck around with, including the usual suspects - everything from Golf GTIs to McLaren P1s. Fifty may not sound very many, especially given the hundreds on offer in the competition, but the team will be releasing an additional 38 cars as DLC - some of which will be free - over the next nine months. Jamie Brayshaw, Senior Community Manager at Evolution, told TG.com that each car takes nine man-months to model and build. That should give you some indication of just how good these things look. Which is very good indeed.

And those all-important physics? They take some getting used to, but once you have, there is a welcome amount of difference in how the cars drive and react. An Audi RS6 feels very stable and solid, and a BAC Mono much pointier and trickier to control. The sense of speed makes the racing seem frantic and immediate, but too frequently you pick up a penalty for innocently falling off the track, or for being hit by a militant AI driver in a Bentley Continental.

You have five locations to race in: Canada, Scotland, Chile, Norway and India. Each location boasts 11 tracks - a mix of circuits and point-to-points. There are no real-world tracks in Driveclub, but that didn't stop the developers from rendering everything in excellent detail. Dynamic weather in the form of rain and snow will be added in the next couple of months (we had a quick go, it already looks great). Elect to start a race on a sunny day, but pick rain, and you'll have to wait for clouds to form before they start spitting. And once the rain stops, dry-lines will appear more quickly, in say, Chile than Scotland, because in Chile the ambient temperature is so much higher. It's the most ambitious weather-modelling we've seen yet in a driving game.

Weather isn't the only thing that'll be added. Rustchynsky and Brayshaw told TG that there are no plans (yet) for a sequel to Driveclub, because the team will continue to work on the existing game for the next 12 months, reworking and refining various things based on feedback from players and live telemetry. They can tweak the relative performance of cars, or alter how corner-cutting penalties are applied for example. Then there's the DLC - 38 cars over nine months and a few tracks. All of the track and game updates - like weather - will be free.

Driveclub sits atop that pointy fence that separates your iRacings from your Need For Speeds. In Fame Points and clubs, you have the scoring system and social integration we've seen so many times before, but in the stunning visuals and impressive attention to detail, you have a game that more closely resembles Forza 5 or Gran Turismo. They've tried to make a game that appeals to all racing fans, and in that they have broadly succeeded.

But there are flaws. The AI seems to punt you off the track at every available opportunity, and Forza has it beat when it comes to customisation and handling. It's early days for us with Driveclub - we only had a few hours behind the wheel - and there's that promise of continued evolution in the form of DLC and the superb level of detail. It will be interesting to see if it's the kind of game we come back to again and again...

Driveclub will be released in the UK on October 10th

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You wait all year for a decent next-gen racing game, and then four come along all at once. Following The Crew, Forza Horizon 2 and Project Cars, here's Driveclub - a PS4 exclusive from the studio that bought you rather excellent and under-rated Motorstorm.

The game takes place around small clubs, each with no more than six members. Being a member of a club gives you access to special challenges and races, and the success of every individual benefits the club as a whole. So, for example, game director Paul Rustchynsky told TG.com that there are ten cars where once one member wins access to it, the whole club has it. Leave the club, and you lose the car.

From the main menu then, you have a few options. Besides Online, you can dive into Tour mode, or specify a single race, time trial or drift event and set the parameters yourself. There are a fair few races in Tour to keep you busy, and you still earn Fame for you and your club. But so centered on social interaction is Driveclub, that without an internet connection, or indeed any online friends, the game's appeal is severely limited.

So, we head online. In a mechanic similar to the likes of the recent Burnout games, every now and then a challenge will pop up mid-race, encouraging you to beat a random opponent's or a friend's score over a specified piece of track. The score might relate to drifting, or how closely you can stick to the racing line. You're free to ignore them, but they do at least vary the car-to-car action.

These challenges earn you Fame Points - the scoring metric around which Driveclub is based. Mostly, you earn them without really trying. Travelling at high-speed, drafting, drifting and clean overtakes will all net a few hundred at a time - but start wantonly bashing into other drivers or cutting corners, and you may soon find yourself with only a few to your name.

And speaking of clean overtakes, there are 50 cars on the original roster to muck around with, including the usual suspects - everything from Golf GTIs to McLaren P1s. Fifty may not sound very many, especially given the hundreds on offer in the competition, but the team will be releasing an additional 38 cars as DLC - some of which will be free - over the next nine months. Jamie Brayshaw, Senior Community Manager at Evolution, told TG.com that each car takes nine man-months to model and build. That should give you some indication of just how good these things look. Which is very good indeed.

And those all-important physics? They take some getting used to, but once you have, there is a welcome amount of difference in how the cars drive and react. An Audi RS6 feels very stable and solid, and a BAC Mono much pointier and trickier to control. The sense of speed makes the racing seem frantic and immediate, but too frequently you pick up a penalty for innocently falling off the track, or for being hit by a militant AI driver in a Bentley Continental.

You have five locations to race in: Canada, Scotland, Chile, Norway and India. Each location boasts 11 tracks - a mix of circuits and point-to-points. There are no real-world tracks in Driveclub, but that didn't stop the developers from rendering everything in excellent detail. Dynamic weather in the form of rain and snow will be added in the next couple of months (we had a quick go, it already looks great). Elect to start a race on a sunny day, but pick rain, and you'll have to wait for clouds to form before they start spitting. And once the rain stops, dry-lines will appear more quickly, in say, Chile than Scotland, because in Chile the ambient temperature is so much higher. It's the most ambitious weather-modelling we've seen yet in a driving game.

Weather isn't the only thing that'll be added. Rustchynsky and Brayshaw told TG that there are no plans (yet) for a sequel to Driveclub, because the team will continue to work on the existing game for the next 12 months, reworking and refining various things based on feedback from players and live telemetry. They can tweak the relative performance of cars, or alter how corner-cutting penalties are applied for example. Then there's the DLC - 38 cars over nine months and a few tracks. All of the track and game updates - like weather - will be free.

Driveclub sits atop that pointy fence that separates your iRacings from your Need For Speeds. In Fame Points and clubs, you have the scoring system and social integration we've seen so many times before, but in the stunning visuals and impressive attention to detail, you have a game that more closely resembles Forza 5 or Gran Turismo. They've tried to make a game that appeals to all racing fans, and in that they have broadly succeeded.

But there are flaws. The AI seems to punt you off the track at every available opportunity, and Forza has it beat when it comes to customisation and handling. It's early days for us with Driveclub - we only had a few hours behind the wheel - and there's that promise of continued evolution in the form of DLC and the superb level of detail. It will be interesting to see if it's the kind of game we come back to again and again...

Driveclub will be released in the UK on October 10th

# data.attributes.body.summary
Another brand new racing game has landed, but is the PlayStation 4’s newest racer any good?