Look, I'll admit that this game is not necessarily in my wheelhouse. I'm an unapologetic Forza Horizon guy. I'd rather tear up a beach in a Halo Warthog than politely do three laps around a real world circuit in a Honda Civic. But I can enjoy simcade games and I had a decent time with last year's Gran Turismo so I thought I'd check out the new Motorsport via Game Pass.
If Gran Turismo felt pretentious and silly then Motorsport feels like visiting the house of a rich and extremely uptight classmate, where you're allowed to sit at the table and have a glass of water but you can't touch anything or speak loudly or have any unsanctioned fun.
Not only does the game require practice laps before each race as it very slowly unwinds its progression, but IT HAS NO MUSIC. NO MUSIC IN A DRIVING GAME! I'm not saying it needs Horizon's suite of radio stations with funny DJs and eclectic rap and pop songs, but how about just slapping the music from the Horizon classical station on there? Gran Turismo has music. Who wants to run practice laps with no music before every race? And to the extent those people exist aren't they playing even simmier games?
Maybe this is designed for online races and they don't really care about the single player, but I feel like this game was made for a very small crowd of hardcore racing fans. I have not seen a lot of discussion around its launch or Microsoft touting how many players it has but maybe it's doing well. Still I'm kind of bewildered that they spent all this time to make the game and while the graphics look great and the handling feels very good they seem to not have spent any time on adding flavor to attract more casual fans.
Are there a lot of fans of this kind of self serious super dry racing out there or is everyone just going to sample it and go back to Horizon? So far under 40% of players have finished the initial series of 3 races, which seems like a steep drop off but is not unheard of for Game Pass.
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