Project Motor Racing review: in its current state it's... a bit of a mess

Arriving in a late bid for your simracing pocket money in 2025 is Project Motor Racing. If that name sounds eerily familiar, that's because it's designed by a bunch of the folks behind the well-regarded Project CARS series. Clearly, this game is designed to be recognised as a bona fide successor to those games without causing the company lawyer to go red and clutch their chest.

While many racing sims these days launch in some form of Early Access on PC, allowing them to earn some vital cash with limited content and unfinished features, the developers of Project Motor Racing took the courageous and admirable step of releasing it as a full-priced game. As regrettable decisions go, though, it's going to rank up there with whoever first said the musical Cats would make a great movie, particularly if it featured a terrifying, fur-covered James Corden.

That's because Project Motor Racing is, in its current state, a bit of a mess. For a start, the game engine, which is typically to be found powering the more ponderous Farming Simulator games, seems woefully unequipped for a racing sim. Graphically, this looks about a decade old, with flat lighting and low-detail track environments, and in many ways it's a less attractive game than Project CARS 2 was back in 2017. That's not the direction progress is supposed to go.

Graphics aren't the be-all and end-all, though, that honour is reserved for the handling, and unfortunately it's the very definition of a mixed bag. Some of the older cars, particularly ones that favour a more slidey, turning-on-throttle driving style, feel relatively natural. There's a fair few historic options as well, because the car selection is a genuinely brilliant mix of eras in sportscar and GT racing.

Anything after about the year 2001, though, is likely to be a real struggle because of a general sense of disconnection from the asphalt, even if you take the time to dial in some force feedback feel via the settings. The Hypercar class of cars in particular, which are tricky to extract pace from even in other sims, are unusual, unpredictable and handle with all the poise of a broken shopping trolley, regardless of whether they're on cold tyres or not.

Then there's a pick and mix selection of other deeply infuriating issues, including an unnecessarily punitive penalty system that slaps you with an instant two second penalty for track limits even if you're the one who's been shunted off the road into a spin. Multiplayer races are often decided by who had the fewest minor off-track excursions. The single player career mode has an intriguing (and realistic) structure where you have to pay for any damage to your vehicle, but that's the last thing you need when the AI cars seem only dimly aware of your presence on the track. They stick religiously to their line and will merrily turn directly into you even if you're completely alongside them into a corner. Utterly maddening.

It's sort of heartbreaking, because occasionally the planets align and you get a momentary glimpse at the good time you could be having. Diving through the Craner Curves at 'Derby' (Donington Park, to its friends) and braking into The Old Hairpin as your GT1 Lotus Elise squirms beneath you, you get an idea of what developer Straight4 Studios was aiming for. Unfortunately what they hit was themselves. In the foot.

The problem is that Project Motor Racing feels like exactly that: a project. A work in progress. There's undoubtedly huge potential there – the content in the game has been expertly curated by people who clearly love motorsport and console players in particular are crying out for a more sophisticated sim with structured online play – but at the moment that potential is almost completely buried under a mountain of issues. Whether or not the game clings on long enough to receive the fixes and tuning it needs remains to be seen, and we sincerely hope it does, but we don't blame you if you don't fancy playing the role of guinea pig.