Project Motor Racing arrives on PS5 promising decades of simulator heritage and a bold new standard for digital motorsport. In practice, it feels more like a mid-life crisis on wheels: loud, ambitious, and desperately insisting it’s still got it. With that in mind, let’s take a steady look at what actually works – and what careers off the track entirely.
Gaming Heaven
To give credit where it’s due, the car list is impressively broad. You can hop from modern prototypes to wonderfully eccentric classics, all recreated with clear enthusiasm. The track roster is equally varied, offering everything from tight club circuits to world-famous giants – albeit often under names that feel suspiciously like witness-protection aliases. The full day–night cycle and dynamic weather add some welcome drama, and the engine audio is genuinely superb. Whatever else the game gets wrong, it never struggles to sound like a proper racing title.
The career mode, while hardly revolutionary, at least tries to add structure. Budgeting, travel costs, sponsorship quirks, and the possibility of financially bankrupting yourself provide an oddly relatable flavour of motorsport misery. Presentation is tidy, loading is painless, and the menus don’t require a PhD in UX design. Small mercies.
Gaming Hell
Unfortunately, the driving itself wobbles between “accessible” and “did the laws of physics nip out for a cigarette?”. Cars behave with an arcade looseness that would horrify any true sim purist; if sliding a GTO around Sebring like a rally special stage is your dream, you’re in luck, but it doesn’t exactly scream authenticity.
The AI, meanwhile, behave like they’re paid per collision. They plough through you with all the courtesy of a supermarket trolley on Black Friday, and with no reliable radar or spotter, cockpit view becomes a form of motorsport Russian roulette. Even the spectacle wavers: gorgeous at times, oddly flat in chase cam, and always waiting for you to push the weather system too far and discover its crashing point.
Final Judgement
Project Motor Racing has ambition, range and a decent set of tools, but too many basics wobble under scrutiny. Beneath the nice presentation lies an experience that’s more chaos than craft. If you fancy a sim that doesn’t quite simulate, this might entertain – but anyone seeking a genuinely serious racer should keep their helmet firmly on and look elsewhere.
