Assetto Corsa Competizione Impressions

In the console sim racing game world of Forza, Gran Turismo, Project Cars (well, the first two entries) and F1, the Assetto Corsa series can seem slightly inaccessible and less fully featured. I largely have ignored the series, assuming that I just wasn’t hardcore enough to get into it.

Thankfully, at least with Assetto Corsa Competizione, I was wrong. The game was released on PC in 2019 and came to consoles this summer, touting its standing as the official game of the Blancpain GT World Challenge, a worldwide endurance and sprint racing series featuring GT3 and GT4 class cars.

I can’t comment on how well the game recreates the actual racing series, but the actual on-track racing is superb. I’ve mainly tried the game’s career mode, which puts your driver through a series of one-off events and sprint races. It’s a great introduction to the game that lets you get used to the core gameplay.

Racing on the gamepad feels great. It’s not as easy or intuitive as a game like Forza Motorsport, but I found it far more accessible than Project Cars 2 (again, we can pretend that 3 doesn’t exist.)

Going through a sprint race weekend in career mode is pretty satisfying. You’ve got a 10-minute practice session, two Qualifying sessions and then the two races. Races are 20 minutes long, and require at least one pit stop. I haven’t mastered the pit stop process yet. I will generally end the pit stop cycle four or five places back from where I started, and often can’t claw my way back to the front by the end.

Even racing on a controller, you can really feel the impact of running over a kerb that you shouldn’t. The game rewards precision driving and punishes mistakes. Even still, the mistakes are decidedly human error and not due to poor controls.

I imagine that most Assetto Corsa players will stick to online or even exhibition races where you can set your own lengths, difficulties and more. The couple of times I hopped online were smooth, but there is just a lack of others racing on the system. Assetto Corsa is a niche game in the niche sim racing genre, and online lobbies are tough to find.

All-in-all, Assetto Corsa Competizione provides a superb racing experience that offers something a little bit different from the Forza or Gran Turismo series.

Assetto Corsa Competizione was played on an Xbox One X with a code provided by the developer. This article was written by GamesReviews.com contributor Seth Roy.