Progression is unspectacular - earn the requisite amount of medals in one tier before unlocking the other - and it's only enlivened by some charmingly stilted flavour text threading together the time attacks, races and championships. The single-player campaign is a limp sprawl, starting you off in a lively if underpowered Abarth 500 before taking you through a thin medley of sports cars, hypercars and all the way up to single-seaters.
Car population is dictated by the number of pit boxes on any given circuit and the bandwidth available, and while the current penalty system can be overly harsh, it doesn't detract from some respectable racing. Once you're in it's good enough, though, and - as ever in this game - it's all defined by those who play it. There's sadly no satisfactory way to compare hot-laps, and racing requires going into a server booking system that's needlessly convoluted. Like so much else in Assetto Corsa, going online requires a little elbow grease. Much has been added across those 12 months - though, to put it bluntly, the headline new features fail to make Assetto Corsa really sing.
That much has been obvious to the sizeable community Assetto Corsa has attracted since it went into Early Access well over a year ago, and it's just as true of the full and final release, the game ticking over into version 1.0 towards the tail-end of last year. It's not as stunning as DriveClub or Project Cars, sure, but Assetto Corsa has a beauty of its own.
None of that really matters, though, when the driving is this good. Its dressings are functional, its presentation stern and with few frills. As a game, it so often falls flat, offering a bloodless lattice of events and a career mode that goes from zero to nowhere across a life-sapping crawl of hours.
It's worth bearing that in mind when it comes to this PC racing sim, constructed some 240 miles south of Maranello at Italian outfit Kunos Simulazioni. Different cars have different purposes, and it's often more enlightening to assess how well they fulfil their own goals than to attempt a dry appraisal of the whole package.Īssetto Corsa has been built to celebrate the joy of cars, and the fantasy of tossing them about with abandon it's about the heart-in-mouth moment when an RUF Yellowbird steps its tail-end ludicrously out of line before it's wrestled back from the precipice, or the feeling of getting a BMW E30 M3's chassis stretching like putty in your hands as you playfully ply it from one extreme of a track to another. Would you whine about the lack of a cup holder in a LaFerrari? There's little point griping over the absence of certain luxuries in Ferrari's most recent, most excessive hypercar, and - if you're ever lucky enough to find yourself in one of those exotic cockpits - your only concerns should be the 900bhp that's under your right foot and the suite of wonderful tools constructed in Maranello to help you apply all of that power to the tarmac.