Project Motor Racing arrives with big ambitions. It is effectively the spiritual successor to the Project CARS series — it even brings Ben Collins back as your race engineer— but this time pitched as a far more serious racing simulator. Yet it launches on consoles as well as PC — not exactly the traditional home for hardcore sims.
That made me curious — could Project Motor Racing be a serious simulation game that’s also accessible to casual players?
The short answer: Not quite.
Project Motor Racing delivers glimpses of what it aims for, yet it could have done with a little less promise and a lot more polish.
Graceful physics, glitchy performance
Project Motor Racing runs on the GIANTS Engine 10, which powers impressive tech. Circuits evolve dynamically — rubber builds up on the racing line, marbles accumulate off it. Water behaves naturally, forming puddles in low spots during wet conditions. The tyre model is a strength, with grip changing meaningfully as temperatures, wear, and surface conditions shift under you.
Unfortunately, the brilliance of the physics engine is undermined by inconsistent performance. Random pauses, ultra-low FPS, crashes, and surreal bugs — including one moment where everything ran at 2x speed. Optimisation is clearly unfinished, as even on the ROG Xbox Ally X — a brand-new, highly capable handheld — it took significant GPU and CPU tweaking to achieve even ~25 FPS.
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Immersive and gorgeous… if you’ve got the grunt
Project Motor Racing can look stunning. Weather effects shimmer, twilight races glow, and cockpit interiors are intricately detailed. You can even make out individual blades of grass in the run-off areas (GIANTS Software developed Farming Simulator, after all). Yet, unless you have an absurdly powerful setup, much of that beauty remains theoretical as you inevitably sacrifice fidelity for framerate.
There’s no meaningful way to enjoy the spectacle, either. Replays look and run poorly, and there’s no photo mode. A baffling omission for a game with a clear focus on aesthetics.
On the audio side, though, it nails the brief — raw, aggressive, and authentic. Cockpit view captures the kind of visceral audible violence anyone who has sat in a race car will recognise.
Career, content and questionable AI
The numbers — 70 licensed cars and 28 track layouts — are respectable, and there will be plenty more through DLC. However, this is noticeably thinner than its predecessors at launch. That being said, the variety within the car roster is good, with a satisfying spread of modern machinery and some excellent classic race cars.
Career mode is structured around a traditional practice-qualifying-race weekend, with a simple but effective budget mechanic and sponsorship system layered on top. It is a novel loop, and you can choose how much the financial side bites. Strip that away, though, and you are still just moving from one championship to the next with limited structural variety and not all that many circuits, so it feels a little shallow.
AI is… serviceable, but far from forgiving. They have zero spatial awareness, and when they inevitably push you off track, expect a penalty — the game does not differentiate fault or consider whether you gained an advantage. Their pace is also inconsistent across tracks, leading to some circuits where you’re leagues ahead and others where you’re stuck at the back. This is a problem when you are required to lock in the difficulty at the start of your career.
If you reach the limit of your AI frustrations, the game offers online multiplayer with cross-play across PC and consoles — a significant plus that should help maintain healthier online lobbies.
Controller experience is important, but imperfect
For players without a sim setup — aka me — the controller experience is crucial. Project Motor Racing is inconsistent here as well. Some cars feel natural and controllable, but others — notably in the top classes — are borderline undriveable. The older classes feel like they received more TLC.
The game offers extensive assists and input customisation to help translate its physics engine to a controller, but this is not plug-and-play territory. Significant time invested in tuning controller settings is a must.
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On the plus side, the controller haptics are excellent — rumble strips vibrate aggressively, and tyre stress is well-translated into tactile feedback. Unfortunately, the haptic feedback cut out repeatedly across multiple controllers, leaving a key sensory cue missing far too often.
Caught between two worlds
Project Motor Racing seems torn between two ambitions. If it wants to compete amongst the elite sim ranks, it needs more polish, stability and consistency in quality across cars. If it aims to be an accessible console racer, it needs better plug-and-playability, a deeper career offering, more car and track variety, and much better AI.
Ultimately, all players want is for the cars to work and the races to feel good. At launch, Project Motor Racing hasn’t quite delivered on that.
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Final thoughts: Not quite race-ready
Project Motor Racing is an ambitious sim that occasionally delivers the kind of immersive experience it promises — but those moments are surrounded by technical issues, thin content, and missing features. The foundation is solid, and many problems feel fixable with time (particularly as there is mod support), but the current offering is an underdeveloped experience that demands more tolerance for frustration than most players will have.
A day one patch is planned, with the developers highlighting some updates in a recent YouTube video, but we have yet to see it hit the track. Stay tuned for how it impacts the final experience, but with a launch price of $108 AUD on Steam or $124 AUD on consoles, Project Motor Racing is a tough sell.
Quest Daily scores Project Motor Racing:
6/10
Project Motor Racing is out on 26 November on PC via Steam for $108 AUD, and Playstation 5 and Xbox Series X|S for $124 AUD.
A review copy of Project Motor Racing was supplied to Quest Daily for the purpose of this review.
