Simraceway Review

Website: https://www.simraceway.com/‎
*Currently in Beta*
Category: Motor Racing
Cost: Free (has micro-transactions)
My Rating: 85%

Simraceway is an up and coming online racing platform that's currently in an open beta stage. It's available for free with all the tacks and 3 cars by default, with many other cars currently available for purchase and more under development. 

Cars
The development team at Simraceway have the luxury of having their own track and racing instruction school at the Infineon Raceway in Sonoma, California, complete with a team of experienced racing drivers. This allows the team to really get most realistic driving experience for the cars they develop - of which they have made some videos of the process: http://youtu.be/A2LrA_4zaaU. I have done test drives of a good dozen of the cars they offer, from VW Jettas to Maserati supercars, go-karts to IndyCar and while I don't claim to be a racing guru, my opinion of the physics is that they are very well done: Even low powered cars can catch you out if you make a complete mess of a corners (I always drive will all the driving aids turned off). High powered cars can be almost undrivable if you don't know how to deal with them, but far from that acting against the game, it really shows off the difficulties of driving and racing these cars as you would face if you tried it for real. It also means when you do eventually master driving a car and put out a great flying lap, you get a great sense of satisfaction from the challenge!

The cars are visually well modelled both internally and externally. Damage (with the exception of major individual components such as wheels and wings) is not modelled visually, which is a bit disappointing but the game is still in beta. The physics modelling of damage is also very well done, and while fairly simple low powered cars can take a few bashes before any noticeable impact, but gently glance a wall in a supercar and expect to suffer for your crime!

Overall, the cars look great and handle realistically ("well" is a very subjective term).

Tracks
Simraceway has decent lineup of tracks, which they release for free when they are developed. Being an American-based company, most of the tracks available are based there and features a mix of road courses such a Sonoma and the Circuit of the Americas and oval tracks such as Daytona and Indianapolis. There are a few famous tracks outside America, including Silverstone and Zandvoort, with more surely to be added. One feature I did like was that all the variations of circuits are neatly grouped in one menu per track, unlike other racing sims. The tracks themselves all seem well modelled with tracks, kerbs, gravel traps and features all appear to be correctly placed, though I haven't visited any of them in person!

While I do have a strong computer setup, I'm still very very impressed with optimisation of the game as a whole. With full graphics settings, 59-AI cars racing on a track AND fraps recording the screen, the game remained at a comfortable 50-60 FPS. Things only got a bit hairy when large crashes involving many cars brought the FPS down to about 15 FPS, but those are exceptional circumstances. This allows the tracks and backgrounds to be modelled in great detail, and they are!

Single-player
As a multi-player platform, single-player comes in the form of "practice", where you can either take a car around your track by yourself, or race against the AI. The AI races are all very mechanical: all the cars look identical and all follow near-perfect vector lines, which takes alot of the fun out of single player racing, albeit, single player isn't a full feature of Simraceway.

Multi-player
Multi-player is the main staple of gameplay in Simraceway and comes in two forms: Quick Races and Events. In quick-races, its a straight up race against other people on a track. Sometimes its all in the same car and recently, users can select from a set of cars. So, the experience boils down to the people you play with, which is usually bad - "rammers" are very infuriating and can put to waste what is usually 90% of a great race. Of course, in racing, accidents happen all the time, but rammers intentionally hit into your car hard and there is no punishment for regular offenders. This can sometimes reduce your time on the game to waiting until the people you know are rammers to leave or go into a race so that you can form another one of your own, which is very detrimental to the experience. 

In these races, qualifying is done away with and instead, users starting positions are determined by their Skillquant. The Skillquant is a well balanced score and is worked out by several factors including how many places you've gained/lost during races, how often you followed the racing line and how often you lost control of the car. I think its a very good idea as it means having a minor bump or a bad start doesn't mean the end of your race-winning career, and gives a good reflection on users actual racing ability.

Events are races against the clock, where you go to a track by yourself and try to get the best time. What I really like about events is the ghosts, if you enable them. When you start, you get the ghost of the slowest recorded time and when you set a time, the ghost then becomes that of the person above you in the timing sheets, and so on until you are at the top. It can be very comical to be worried about having the ghost in front of you, only to see it spin off into a wall and you know you're getting a better time! That feature makes the Event experience quite pleasurable in my experience.   

Other Features
Other than the default cars, you are required to buy to other cars which can be done with real money, or "credits". Credits are worth 0.1 cents per credit, but as you race online in either events or quick races, you gain 5 credits for every lap you complete, which is nice as regular users can then "win" the cars they want, rather than having to spend money.

There is another major feature, which I will discuss in my next post.
 

Issues
One of the major problems I have with this game as it is, as I've already discussed, is rammers, and I hope that Simraceway can come up with some way of dealing with them that prevents them from racing in that manner and discourages others from doing the same.

Given the diversity and optimisation of the game as a whole, even in the beta stage it is now, I feel it would not take a significant amount of work to add a full featured single player mode, be it customisable careers or just individual races with imperfect-AI driven cars. While at the moment, the safety car is not functioning on all tracks, when it was working, it provided a very good racing experience with full flags and I really enjoyed the fact you could opt in to formation laps for standing or rolling starts. Realistically, if they just fixed the safety car and made some AI profiles with different liverys then they could turn the game from a good online racing platform to the one of the most diverse modern racing gamings on the market today, and (perhaps as someone with a fairly slow internet), I do feel the game is lacking for it.

Nevertheless, given the platform is completely free, if you're into racing its very much worth a look. Despite my few criticisms it has now become my racing sim of choice, and I have recently introduced my friend to it too: he's now hooked!

Want to see more? Check out my Simraceway videos on my Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/hibblejaybob

Thanks for reading!