Recent reviews by Arburich

A decade later and it still has outclassed nearly every other racing sim on the market to date.

Mods add another level to it. Best played with friends and at Nurburgring.

The simulation update launched this game into the stratosphere of amazing simulated train games.

This game used to be VR only. Now there is a desktop mode + a crazy awesome external control view that makes this game playable on pretty much anything.

The trains and world are incredibly simulated, every aspect of this game screams polish and love.

If you like driving trains and delivering cargo on a closed map, this is literally the perfect game to try out!

Quite honestly a perfect game.

I love dropping 500kg bombs on the head of a squishy bug and watching the kaboom.

I love dropping 380mm HE bombardments on factories and watching the kaboom.

I love dropping 280mm HE bombardments on my friends and watching the kaboom.

I love dropping impact grenades on the hellbomb in front of me and watching the kaboom.

I love watching Sony force players 3 months after launch to make a PSN account, and watching the kaboom...


Edit: Sony is walking back the account linking requirement. Changing it back to a positive :)

It's very hard to describe the exact itch this game scratches. But whatever that feeling is, it does it perfectly.

There is a steep learning curve. Once you figure it out it's great fun!

Extended Pros:

+ Excellent VR / Peripheral Support. I made a full size aluminum rail cockpit for driving simulators. Never once have I had an issue with VR, moza wheel, heusinkveld pedals, Varjo Aero, or triple screens.
+ Optimized for the potato-est among potato computers (might change come rain updates).
+ Highest grade simulation quality.
+ Hands down the best POSSIBLE (not guaranteed) multiplayer experience you will get in a competitive racing game thanks to the incident and reporting system.
+ Constantly updated by very active and interested developers that will stop at nothing to make the best simulation possible.
+ I race the 3h-24h events for fun, it's extremely fun and thrilling to get to race in such a long event every month or so.
+ The patch notes are ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ HUGE, expansive, and detail everything being fixed or worked on.
+ A ridiculous variety of motorsports are available to race with (see cons about race sizes)
+ Crashes are visceral, brutal, and have a good damage model system. It teaches drivers to drive for the race, not the position. (usually)
+ The best races are the ones with pit-stops (endurance events)
+ Laser scanned tracks with crazy realistic track data and road parameters. Tracks are lifelike to the utmost degree.
+ If you race an official race every week during a 12(1) week season, you can get a few dollars for your time.
+ The AI for solo racing or practicing is pretty ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ awesome. It's fairly new and yet it's far better than many other racing games.



Now for the Cons, which mainly revolve around cost:

- 1 month is $12.99 a month, 6 months is $11.67 a month, 12 months is $9.42 a month. Just like EvE, WoW, etc, subscriptions are expensive and iracing doesn't give enough incentive to purchase more time outright.
- Privately hosted races and servers require money to pay for. Typically, $0.50 an hour. You cannot race with your friends unless you create custom servers, or are very equal in iRating and get lucky with splits, or you run in low population events. This is absurd and hosting a private session should be free if people are already paying for tracks, cars, and a subscription.
- Tracks / Cars are sold separately and can add up very quickly. Expect $8-15 per track and car. You typically only need one track / car to gain a full racing license. Some people get away with a single car purchase and subscription.
- Graphics leave a little to be desired at times, but aren't bad by any means for a 15 year old game with live updates. This also helps the game run phenomenally well for VR or triple screens.
- No rain simulation (yet, its coming the next update and looks promising)
- Low population races exist, there is a chance that the car / track combo you want is not played by many players except in one or two peak hours held by 3rd party gaming groups or event creators. This can occur during peak playing hours too! Since the population of iracing is worldwide, peak hours for some events or races can be a little difficult to adjust to!
- Not all damage models are similar and some cars are more forgiving than others with damage. (this is being actively worked on and not a lot of cars are left on the old damage model!)
- It's a competitive, online game. You will find idiots infrequently, but they do exist. The steward system is not very transparent on what actions are taken against specific drivers, but through rumors and experience it feels like the steward system generally does it's job well.

In summary: I will probably play iracing till I die. I love simulations, I love racing, I love my VR, I love the community, I love the atmosphere, makI love the friends I e, I love the stories I get to tell. This game seems like it's genuinely taking multiplayer racing seriously enough, and well enough, that I want to give it my money to support it.

However, I would like to not have to pay for hosting a custom server or a custom race with friends by paying money. That really sucks sometimes when I just want to sit at Nords poodling with my friends for 6 hours, but that server time costs $3, plus the track, which was $14, with a $12 car, while paying for a minimum $9 a month membership to use the content I have purchased already. If this changes as the game grows and expands, I will edit this review.

I refunded this game a long time ago because I felt really overwhelmed. I tried it again and ignored all the tutorials and went straight into adventure mode. I used that as my tutorial.

You don't need to know everything to get by. You slap a propeller, engine, some cargo, and a weapon on a little box boat, and a few hours later you have a small missile boat with a keel the size of ur mum.

Then you keep going. You die a few times, make a few more boxes, and eventually make something workable. You realize that you're probably better in a fleet, so you duplicate ur little boat and figure out some AI on it. Now you have 3 missile boats.

Then comes the real fun, making a bigger ship, with custom guns! Make a battleship. Make a submarine. Make a plane. Make a Blimp. Make a dreadnaught. Make a destroyer. Make a cruiser. Make a Single use Nuclear bomb. Make an ICBM carrier. Make a giant ship that spits out mini ships who spit out little drones. Make Yamato. Make a giant pixel art of Miku that fires massive plasma guns out the eye sockets. Literally its a sandbox, just have fun!

Don't let it overwhelm you, you'll learn as you go!

Haven't played since before OW2 was "released".

Join a game with some friends. Some small QoL improvements, game is still fun with friends, all my skins are still there.

I will not ever touch another battlepass, cosmetic, lootbox, or anything thats not free, so I guess I'm not a target audience.

Felt like I was playing OW1 a little, but that's kind of the issue innit?

Honestly, I was going to leave out my review of this game to see where it goes for the future. However, if you watched the game awards you might have noticed that Bethesda deliberately paid for ADVERTISEMENT space within the award show. They didn't even make a new trailer for it either, they just recycled the same launch trailer with fake reviews and ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ marketing. Bethesda must have assumed that their flop wouldn't even get "Best Shovelware 2023" so they gummed up the rest of the show by including an advertisement for a game that already flew off the shelves 3 months ago.

That is what tipped me over the edge on this review. I put about 50 (10 on steam) hours into the game and just couldn't find a rhythm. It feels like walking through a depressive fog playing this game for more than an hour. You spend most of the early game trying to figure out what to do, then you realize that 95% of the game's travel can be skipped entirely by abusing the fast travel system. This is nice to me, except it's painfully obvious that the game was initially built around forcing the player to travel everywhere manually, making large swaths of gameplay redundant or not needed because of how the fast travel system was integrated later in development. There is so much copying and pasting that outside of the main "concourse" areas of travel you just feel like your walking the same paths over and over and over.

But, ok, lets take a step back. It's not all bad. What makes a good Bethesda game? Most people would answer "world building", "story", and "loot".

World Building? 8/10. They tried their best and honestly the world is pretty immersive at times. Most of the world feels cohesive enough to exist, and it can keep you entertained with lore / text / hidden content for a bit. It's pretty hard to drop the world building ball, and at times the copy pasting settlements do break that a bit.

Story? 3/10. Honestly, the worst story that Bethesda has come up with to date. At no point during the main missions did I feel even the slightest bit excited to progress the main story. It feels very bland, like it was written by 15 unpaid interns working 60 hours a week. You'll get more enjoyment out of just playing in the sandbox than anything else.

Loot? 6/10. Good loot. Good stats. Little power ups. Cool Weapons. Cool gear. etc.

That's... that's it. Theres not really much else to the game to be honest.

"What about spaceships? What about base building? What about etcetcetcetc?"
Everything else is so bland that it really doesn't stick out to me enough to talk about. I mean *really* bland. The whole game is a mixed bag of "meh". Sure you can build some weird ship designs, or make a cool base, but the joy is lost after the first couple of times you build a ship or a base. Nothing is making me want to come back to it.

Idk man. If you're on the fence about this already, you've probably got your answer from all the other reviews saying the same thing. It's just disappointing. Nobody was expecting Star Citizen / Elite Dangerous / No Mans Sky, but everyone WAS expecting Skyrim level everything else. This whole game feels like they took a step back a decade in technical feats and slapped on "Generic Story 15™" to sell it, and then everyone bought it. We're all suckers here.

It has been 6 11 14 months since "early access" release of KSP 2.

In that time, we have had 3 patches. Each patch comes with about 90% optimization and bug fixes and maybe 10% of content. Almost none of that content is new when compared to KSP 1, and the parts that are unique to KSP 2 are more like essentials.** There have been frequent patches and updates. Some substantial bugs stand in the way still but overall the game is playable.

No re-entry heating or VFX has been added.**

Rockets are still unbearably wobbly. **

You might average 30 FPS on a big rocket, but anything big has enormous issues other than just FPS.** I am hitting appropriate frames for my rig compared to other graphically impressive games.

To top it all off, the most anticipated portion of the game (colony building and interstellar travel) has no release date. Even basic essentials of KSP like research and career mode are stripped away until development time catches up,** Science is added? No Career.

This is NOT worth $49.99. Even if all promised content was added to the game NOW, working at the same pace and rigidity as KSP1, It would still feel not as worth it.**

Please save your money for something else.** $40 might be worth it. Go for a sale. I will change this review when colonies come out.

**This was fixed as of 12/19.

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5/3/2021 update:
I will change this review back to positive when I hear word of whats going on with the company. Right now it looks like colonies are never coming. It's been a full business week and not much has been spoken of about the layoffs happening at KSP2 that completely shuttered the Seattle Office of Take two. It is uncertain if the studio will finish it's released roadmap and the $40 spent so far have been rather inadequate.

Right now, don't buy this and go play KSP1. Sorry.

Do you find yourself dying a lot? Do you find yourself confused, overwhelmed, and maybe a little drunk?

Tip: SLOW THE F*** DOWN

I'm serious, take 5 seconds longer to do things. Stop sprinting. Stop running around corners at top speed.

Aim down your sights, take the mid-range battle, hold a corner, etc. You'll start getting kills, you'll start getting more awareness, and you'll stop losing so many tickets for your team. GO. SLOW.

Also, get revived! If there is a medic around, just wait 5 seconds! You'll not only be dragged back into cover and revived, but you can keep fighting.

Low level? Play as a frontline medic or a mid-range support. Drop ammo bags for people, revive, heal, etc.

Very fun game. It's:
- Cheap
- Good gameplay
- Good gunplay
- Good maps

"bUt ItS uGlY"

Yeah, so is ur mom