[ system: XboxOne standard w/ thrustmaster TX. Written after approximately 50 hours of play]
The weather, track selection and sound of (only some of) the cars is superb. The graphics are quite nice, at times - particularly reflections on the darker, glossy paint jobs. When I first started the game, it immediately felt like a leap in quality compared to PC1. The configure-ability and attention given to career mode and multiplayer and A.I. seems pretty good.
Unfortunately, the problems are too numerous and critical to overlook.
- A.I.: A common problem in all driving games, but this is one of the worst. IN lower-powered races it's no big deal, but if an AWD car is behind you in a RWD car, and you don't avoid any wheelspin, they will crash right into you before you even make it off the line! Then A.I. will do their damndest to hit you before the first turn. It didn't seem to matter how careful I was to avoid getting hit, either, regardless of the A.I. settings.
- SOUND: No ambient reflections, just clinical/dry plain engine sound. Tire noise sucks, which is a shame since the tires usually feel good and respond well. But other than under hard braking, burnouts and slides you won't hear them. Overall audio volume level is only about half of other driving games. That's a real head-scratcher. Gearbox can be annoyingly louder than the engine can be adjusted to, while manual has a similar "thunk" to dog-cut and/or racing sequentials. Engine sounds were better balanced against other sounds - fuller and with greater detail in PC1 across the board, so this is rather disappointing. Many cars in PC2 are more shrill, especially the rally cars and turbo-4cylinders. s. Most anything but a V8 sounds harsh and unappealing here; 4-pot Renaults sound like a garbage dispenser eating a pack of nails.
- REPLAY: dreadful engine sound on most cars, lame angles, poor camera cycling options, and god do the cars look SLOW SLOW SLOW. :-(
- FFB Wheel Users: With some wheels, this game may try to injure you. And unless you are in good physical shape it may likely wrench your wrists and arms about during crashes, before making adjustments. The problem is that there is no good implementation to aid adjustments; many adjustments to FFB seem redundant or effect a ridiculously wide range.... so guesstimating where your wheel should be is potentially treacherous. Even worse, these new and supposedly 'helpful' categories of FFB: "immersive", "raw" etc... act as just another impediment.
- CLUTCH: One of the weaker aspects of the game. PC1 grinded gears when you failed to use the clutch, but somehow this one doesn't. You can simply IGNORE the clutch to no detriment, as far as I can tell. Odd.
- DEFAULT TUNING SETUP: Cars all come with a default setup called "loose" - which it is usually anything but. Around 20-30 of the cars drive brilliantly. However most are are set up in some bizarre way as to be unfathomable as to why the car would be set up to ever snap and yank so much as they do. Perhaps it's thrustmaster thing, I dunno, because PC1 had a similar problem. It doesn't seem to produce consistent FFB response every time you drive the same car either; I just don't know why it does this and it's freaking weird. The 'Race Engineer' is barely helpful in any sense and is mostly a wasted feature.
- ASSISTS: The 'Gameplay' menu of assist adjustment sliders ~seems~ to offer control over ABS, TC and the like. However, while offering various settings, sliders become 'stuck' or greyed out as to be rendered useless. Oddly, on-the-fly switching or adjustment may be available, but it is trapped in a convoluted menu (a menu that you're supposed to dive into while driving... wtf were they thinking?) and a dreadful increment adjustment that is unfeasible, to say the least. I CANNOT tick through 50+ (i stopped counting) 'levels' of traction control while driving. 5 is MORE than enough for conceivably anyone... wth??!!
- PUNCTURES and DAMAGE: I haven't had any flat tires. Very strange, considering the attention given to tire modelling in general being high. Cars are also somewhat sturdier than before; I've yet to knock off a wheel once. Losing one used to happen quite often in PC1; around once every other session, roughly. No idea why they'd change it but they did.
TL;DR
PRO the visual presentation, expanded car list, awesome tracks, ANY weather on ANY track(!!!), some of the cars
CON infuriating A.I., the engine sounds, the tuning process in general, FFB default on my wheel and the confusing options, how badly most of the default tunes drive on most tracks in most conditions.
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