Since the game can’t delve into your brain to give you better hand-eye coordination or speed up how fast your synapses fire, instead, it converts the experience points you gain via racing into skills. Remember that the game simulates the racing driver, not just the car. It’s just that the game doesn’t give you as much help when you’re Level 1. It’s important to realise at this point that a Level 1 driver can (theoretically) still do the same lap times as a Level 40 driver. As you progress through the races and seasons, tougher tracks and better cars are unlocked, which can all be used later in the practice and arcade modes. You pick a team depending upon which manoeuvres (such as slipstreamed “cunning” overtakes, or fastest laps) you want to get experience point bonuses for. The career mode forms the core of the game and is worth sticking with, despite any reservations generated from a truly toe-curling tutorial (which you only have to sit through once, thankfully if you’ve completed it with one driver, subsequent drivers you create can skip it entirely). The AI is superb around the dedicated race tracks (Albacrete, Laguna Seca, Hockenheim, etc), so much so that in the touring cars and supercars especially, you may find that it’s you who’s being left thirty seconds behind the leader on a three lap race… Curiously, this last statement only seems to apply for the inner city tracks and for a couple of the countryside tracks. The arcade mode is also a joy, though whilst the initial learning curve is pretty steep, once you’ve progressed through a couple of seasons in the career mode, you may find that the AI becomes a bit of a pushover. There’s nothing quite like powersliding your way around a Milanese roundabout, using the lack of adhesion due to the surface water to help keep the throttle and steering balanced. Evolution GT‘s wet racing is the best in the genre for years. Getting the power down onto slick tarmac without wheelspin, in even the weediest of cars, is truly an art. Players of Geoff Crammond’s Grand Prix series will know exactly what I’m talking about. Things get even more challenging when you add rain. You can feel the sluggishness of the front-wheel drive cars like the Seat Leon compared to the brute power and twitchiness of rear-wheel drive supercars, such as the two versions of the Pagani Zonda and the Mercedes CLK GTR. The handling physics are uniformly superb. The inner city tracks in particular are very well designed, with a nice mix of slow, fast and medium speed corners. Both the cars and the tracks are beautifully modelled. Firstly, Evo GT is absolutely lovely to look at. It would be very easy to get hung up on the RPG element of the game, but to do that would unjustly ignore the work that has gone into the other aspects of the game. But that would be a shame, because you’d be missing out on a truly unique racing game. A word of caution here, however if you don’t think you’re going to be able to buy in to the concept of a game primarily simulating the driver, rather than the car, you’re probably going to want to steer clear (excuse the pun). Yes, SCAR‘s much-maligned driver RPG system is back, only this time, (on the whole) it works, thanks to a comprehensive revamp of the AI. As you can imagine, simulating the level of belief and trust that a racing driver has in their car is very difficult, and the way the team at Milestone have gone about it is undoubtedly the most controversial aspect of the game. So whilst the average Joe would start braking for Donington Park’s Old Hairpin at around 200 metres and take it at 70mph, a racing driver would brake at 75 metres and take it at 100mph. They don’t have the same sense of fear or self-preservation as a normal person. It doesn’t just simulate the car it simulates the racing driver, too. Rather than concentrating on Gran Turismo-style car pornography or super-accurate GTR-style simulation like its competitors, Evolution GT chooses to try and do something different. “Oh, no… not another bloody racing game.” Recognising that the genre is over-saturated, Evolution GT choos es to sit somewhere outside the conventional mould.
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