Project Motor Racing Review – Full Price Early Access

The developers of Project Motor Racing promised players to set a new standard for racing simulators, delivering the thrill and passion of professional motorsports. Find out in our review whether they delivered on their promise.

• Developer: Straight4 Studios
• Publisher: GIANTS Software
• Platforms: PC, PlayStation 5 , Xbox Series X|S
• Release date: November 25, 2025

First, let’s talk about the project’s advantages. Project Motor Racing is quite rich in content, providing plenty to keep players occupied for hours. Career mode offers a choice of difficulty settings, depending on your starting capital: $100,000 for those looking to work their way up from the bottom, mastering each car class one by one; $650,000 for a solid middling driver, allowing you to break into the GT class but still require a challenge to earn a larger sum; and $2 million—this capital allows you to break into any championship from the very beginning.

The career mode also allows you to choose the format (classic with adjustable difficulty or realism) and set the race length from 0.5x to 4x. Players can decide for themselves whether they prefer strict adherence to the rules or playing at their own pace.

If you don’t want to dive into a career, you can choose a race weekend with customizable conditions, try to complete challenges, and finally, compete with opponents in online multiplayer .

There are plenty of cars, from regular production models to hypercars, tracks, including the most famous ones, and modes, including endurance racing. Overall, the game truly offers a lot of entertainment, with plenty of content.

However, that’s where the project’s strengths end. As a simulator, Project Motor Racing falls short of other projects in the genre, across all parameters, from car handling to AI and visuals.

Of course, we didn’t get behind the wheel of a real sports car, but our experience with racing simulators tells us that cars aren’t supposed to behave like this. The slightest turn of the steering wheel instantly sends the car into a skid, or, conversely, it’s extremely reluctant to respond to the player’s input, preventing a smooth turn. The damage system doesn’t work as intended: even if you crash into an obstacle at high speed, you can continue racing as if nothing happened.

As a result, you have to contend more with the car’s behavior than with your opponents. However, the AI ​​here is also quite problematic. Bot cars always follow a set line, don’t try to compete with each other , and confidently crash into the player’s car, which leads to serious consequences – for the player, of course, but not for the bot: after the impact, you’ll likely spin out or be thrown off the track, while the computer opponent will continue on undisturbed.

The system of penalties and penalties defies logical explanation. Simulators typically penalize corner cutting and collisions with time penalties, but in Project Motor Racing, it’s virtually impossible to tell when you’ll get a penalty and when you won’t. Sometimes, driving over a curb or slightly touching an opponent will immediately result in additional seconds, while other times, you can cut a good-sized corner and get no reaction.

Moreover, the game provides virtually no feedback on the car’s performance. It’s difficult to feel the car’s performance without understanding the grip of the tires, and there’s virtually no tactile feedback from the gamepad or steering wheel. There’s almost no sense of simulation, which is, of course, unforgivable for a racing simulator.

In the context of the above, mentioning the weak graphics with unnatural headlight glare and unnatural weather effects, as well as the sound that doesn’t change depending on the camera view or angle , is like beating a man when he’s down. In terms of execution, Project Motor Racing feels like an Early Access product, clearly not deserving of its release status and the publisher’s price tag. Perhaps after a few dozen patches, the situation will improve significantly—history has seen precedents for such things—but for now, the game can’t compete with other racing simulators.