RACE Pro

SimBin’s first console effort is rather surprising

Posted 4 years ago By - Jay Acevedo

If you’re a heavy console player, chances are that you never heard of SimBin and their GTR PC racing franchise before. Knowing that racers aren’t playing on their PC’s anymore, the choice of making the jump to consoles for the first time with a project like RACE Pro couldn’t be more logical. Did logic helped SimBin?


Our first experience with RACE Pro was at E3 08 at the Atari booth, where almost everyone passed on it. Our first impressions were very positive. The racing genre has lost its touch of realism over the years, with gamers digging more games like Need for Speed, Burnout or Project Gotham Racing. While games like Forza Motorsport 2 and Gran Turismo 5 Prologue have been feeding the simulation masses lately, no other company actually took the time to work on something different without trying to re-invent the genre. Releasing this kind of game now, where there’s no actual racing game release until later this year, couldn’t be perfect for SimBin and Atari.

Just like any other racing sim game, RACE Pro’s career mode is where you will likely spend most of your time. In the career mode you play as a professional race car driver that will have to race for different teams and fulfill each team’s contract. These contracts will earn you credits that will be later used to access other races, sign contracts with other teams, unlock cars and of course increase your reputation level that will let you take on the most successful racers. Races will take place in thirteen of the most well-known racing tracks in the world like Brazil’s Autódromo Internacional de Curitiba, Spain’s Circuit de Valencia, Italy’s own Autodromo Nazionale Monza and of course the Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca in the United States. If the tracks are known worldwide, the cars featured in RACE Pro are also very well known by racers alike. While I won’t name all the cars available in the game, all I can say to you is that the game has wide variety of cars to drive and that every car has its own driving particularity, upping the level of realism to one notch.

Aside of the career mode, the game offers other interesting gameplay modes. "Single Race" lets you customize your own event and choose which sessions you want to enable, and which rules to apply. And depending of which difficulty level you will be playing, some setting will or not be available. While loading your event, the game will give you tips and details about the game and the track you will race on. Mutliplayer modes that lets you play against twelve players through Xbox Live, Time Attack and a clever “Hot Seat” offline competitive and/or cooperative mode are also available in RACE Pro. While the Hot Seat and Time Attacks are interesting and addictive to a certain level, the Xbox Live multiplayer section of the game doesn’t work that well. A few connection drops and constant game freezing have been plaguing our multiplayer experience. Nothing huge but enough frequent to make it frustrating at times. And for a reason that we don’t understand, there’s not much people online playing the game. With a 40$ price tag, we guess it’s a matter of time.


It’s known fact that every racing game has difficulty levels and the more you go far into the game, the more difficult it gets. While the game offers different difficulty levels, RACE Pro can adapt rather easily to your racing skills and no matter the difficulty, you will earn the same amount of credits. So no matter if you play Pro or Novice, everything in the game is accessible at some point. In some racing simulation games played on the Novice level, the A.I. can be very permissive and rather dumb at times. In RACE Pro, the racing mechanics are very realistic and unforgivable which will actually force you to race with attention and prudence. You can’t take shortcuts because even if you play at Novice and totally disregard your driving, the A.I will totally pass you and outdo you whenever it can. Sure you will be able to get a hold of the driving mechanics and physics really quickly, especially if you use the driving lines and other help systems available but the real challenge lays in the Semi-Pro and Professional difficulty levels. And if you’re lucky enough to own the Xbox 360 racing wheel, the experience will be even more gratifying.

SimBin is well known for its knowledge when it comes down to car mechanical specifications and response during races. If you’re a racing sim nut, you will be extremely pleased to see the amount of detail shown in RACE Pro. Weight transfer during breakings and accelerations, the centrifugal effect when you’re taking curbs from the exterior, turning point strategies, the usage of aspiration during passings…everything is there. If someone tells you that whoever did this game does not know its racing (trust me, I’ve hear it a lot lately), we can safely say that those people don’t know what they’re talking about. RACE Pro will be hated as much as Gran Turismo and Forza Motorsport simply because some gamers aren’t used to drive for real. Not that I hate other racing games but when it comes down to realism, I want it…and this game has it.

Graphics & Sounds

While the team over at SimBin might know a lot in the driving mechanics and car physics department, RACE Pro does lack personality and appeal in terms of visuals. While the car models look good and the damage is present, the environments are extremely simple. Little details like the lack of tire marks on the tracks, no smoke when you driving outside the track…no visual gravy whatsoever. Still, you will agree that when all your concentration is used to race with no hiccups and finish first, you won’t spend much time looking around at all this. But these little details are noticed by racing fans in the very first races they do.

Where the visual presentation takes a major hit is in the menus. When you’ve been treated with beautiful and elegant menus like those seen in Forza 2 or GRID, the game’s menu surfing and overall presentation is rather poor. Again, every serious racer gamer will rather prefer a plain presentation level and an exceptional and realistic driving experience than the contrary. If you ask me, a uberly-beautiful racing game with poor mechanics has no future.

In terms of audio, there are very few games that are such high quality in graphics that do not have equally high quality environmental effects to go with the game. Not a great music soundtrack but thankfully the car sound effects live up to the quality with extremely realistic environment sounds, vehicle and driving sounds.


Value

Like I pointed out early in the review, the game sells for 40$ and with some luck, you might even find it for less at some places. Even with its presentation flaws, this game offers so much to the racing fan that the price tag is extremely good. And if you’re getting bored of the other racing sims like GT 5 Prologue and Forza 2, all the elements and modes found in RACE Pro will sure keep you busy until the next racing game comes out.

Conclusion

At GameFocus we like to give you our opinion on basically all the games coming out but what we like the most is defending a game that is awfully overlooked and underrated, no matter how different the game is from others and RACE Pro is one of them. While the game won’t win awards for its minimal presentation value, the game shines on the real thing: the driving. And you won’t have any reason to call on SimBin for that.

If you call yourself a racing fan, not owning this game would be a travesty. This is a must have…yes even if its gravy-less.

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