Rennsport review: light on content and plagued by bugs

Another day, another racing sim full of GT3 cars looking to carve out some breathing space in a crowded market. This time it's Rennsport, not to be confused with Ritter Sport, which is a chocolate biscuit. Which is ironic, because Rennsport has arrived a bit half-baked.

It's perhaps not surprising, considering the game's tumultuous development, which began with a plan to release it as a free-to-play title where players would purchase individual cars powered by a faddy NFT system. Sanity prevailed and instead, this final version is a full retail game, available in a box, complete with a selection of content included. The problem is, there's just not that much of it.

There's a reasonable number of circuits, mixing fictional and real-world locations, but the car selection is heavily skewed toward GT3 racecars. The rest of the categories, including the increasingly popular hypercar and GT4 classes, only feature one or two cars to choose from. It feels like all the attention in terms of handling tuning has been lavished on the GT3 cars as well, because some of the other vehicles dance on the brink of driveability. The BMW M2 CS Racing Cup car, for example, feels entirely disconnected from the track surface, like someone has buttered the tyres.

The game is also riddled with bugs, some of which, such as a qualifying bug that invalidates your first and second laps, can spoil your competitiveness in multiplayer, which is fairly egregious. Rennsport is also almost entirely worthless as a single-player game, because the AI competition stretches the definition of 'intelligence' to breaking point. Their pace varies wildly per track, they drive into you like you're not there and it's not uncommon to see computer-controlled cars flipped onto their roof as they get out of shape during the first corner concertina. We've heard of a rolling start, but this is ridiculous.

It's a shame because elements of Rennsport are solid. The game runs smoothly on console and features a robust cross-platform multiplayer, with like-for-like physics across both console and PC versions. That's a rarity among racing sims which tend to take advantage of the PC's superior number crunching power and then have to pare it back for the living room machines. This crossplay means the packed and varied schedule of daily multiplayer races is, for the moment at least, well populated. The track selection contains a few standards, such as Spa and Monza, but there's a couple of welcome, leftfield choices in there such as the Jeddah Corniche Circuit and the Goodwood hillclimb for time trials.

You can absolutely have a fun, competitive multiplayer GT3 race in Rennsport, but the problem is that, by our last count, there were approximately a billion other racing sims where you can also do that. Rennsport could have set itself apart with a more fleshed-out car selection, or by boasting the most realistic handling on console, or even by offering that welcome crossplay in a polished, bug-free package, but it doesn't have any of those things. Those things may improve with time, but at the moment Rennsport is extremely difficult to recommend. Chocolate biscuits, on the other hand...