Recent reviews by Alfrink

Summarized positives:
+ Overall great physics and tyre model, incredibly fun to drive. While real-life tyres and cars obviously all behave differently in different conditions, I think that AC offers one of the more believable slip angle simulations. The cars don't feel perpetually underdriven like in iRacing, but also don't like they're constantly drifting a little bit like in rFactor.
+ The force feedback is the best I've felt and always seems to inform me about everything I want to know. It also feels consistently useful between different vehicle speeds, which is an advantage over Assetto Corsa Competizione, where the cars feel pretty dead to me in low speed corners. For reference, I've used a T150 RS Pro for a long time and eventually switched to a Moza R9.
+ Regarding driving conditions, dynamic tracks allow for a green track to improve as the cars lay down rubber. Ambient and road temperatures exist and affect tyre temperatures. Driving assists (TC, ABS, auto-shifting, auto-clutch, auto-blip, artificial stability control, a lackluster racing line*) can be set depending on whether they're available in the respective car in real life, or overwritten to be on or off at will. Ballast and restrictor handicap options are available. Fuel consumption, tyre wear, slipstreams and tyre blankets exist. Mechanical damage is well detailed, if a bit too forgiving at the 100% setting, but can be set >100% server-side (nobody actually does this - probably for the better!). Visual damage is the usual "look sorta broken but nothing beyond that" ordeal.
+ Cars and tracks are beautiful and extremely detailed. A good amount of tracks are laser-scanned. Road cars come in colours that they exist in in real life; race cars usually have a wide variety of different liveries available to them. Off the track, visual quality can drop off, for example with simple spectators or trees, which I find to be acceptable.
+ Solid, stable multiplayer with good netcode. In fact, "solid" describes the technical side of things very well in general. I have problems coming up with any major bugs that I'm sure are not introduced by mods.
+ A lot of great mods exist that don't just bring more cars and tracks to the mix, but also alleviate some of the game's downsights (see Neutral/Negative points).
+ For people without a FFB wheel, gamepad support exists and the settings you'd probably expect are there. However, most ordinary racing games perform some sort of filtering of overly harsh gamepad inputs or implicitly countersteer, while AC takes gamepad inputs very literally. I recommend the 'Advanced Gamepad Assist' mod, it helps a lot. Nonetheless, a proper FFB wheel (at least a T150 or G27/G29/G920) is more fun and makes it much easier to be smooth, usually yielding faster lap times.

Neutral:
~ The track cut and penalty system does a good job at not letting you cut in places where it wouldn't be allowed in real life, while also accounting for exceptions in some specific corners in which (certain race series) are allowed to cut or go wide. The slowdown penalties are very basic and the resulting time loss can vary a lot depending on where exactly you receive and take the penalty.
~ The AI can be fun to race against, especially as part of the customizable offline championships, but it sometimes feels like they ignore you as a player, as they won't defend properly, are way too lenient if you divebomb or move erratically, or will occasionally bump into you.
~ A singleplayer "career" exists, but it doesn't add a lot to the game and really just consists of thematically grouped events with an occasional cutscene to get a look at whatever car you will be driving next. There are also missions, being just simple events, that award Steam achievements when completed. Neither kept my attention for very long.

Major negatives:
- Unfortunately, bots are unavailable in multiplayer, which means that you can't play with a bunch of friends plus bots to fill up the grid. I can imagine this being a huge point against buying this game for a lot of people, and it's still something that bothers me whenever I play small private lobbies.
- You should probably get the DLCs. While all content is of astonishing quality, the amount of cars and tracks falls behind some competitors, especially if you don't own the expansion packs. These days, on sale, the Ultimate Edition is dirt cheap anyway.
- There are a couple of simulative details that you'd probably expect these days, but AC didn't have yet. Telemetry data for brake and water temperatures exist, but water temperature seems to be calculated very primitively and is never relevant, while brake temperature doesn't seem to work at all. This is unfortunate, as some road cars in the game should have temperature issues when driven on a track and it would make damage behaviour more interesting for all cars. Brakes do get hot visually in an authentic manner.
- No rain simulation.
- The racing line's braking zone indicators are static, which means that they don't account for your current speed. I personally turned the line off soon after I got the game. If you're used to following dynamic racing lines (like in the Codemasters F1 games), this might need some getting used to.

Additionally, while being negatives, the following are irrelevant using mods and other third party offerings:
- The main menu could be more compact, more intuitive and faster. While not being perfect, 'Content Manager' gets rid of a lot of problems, and offers a good bunch of additional features, like making mods easier to install.
- Adding to that, the in-game UI uses a great modular system that allows you to put whatever you want on your screen whereever you want, but it's easy to clutter your screen and still feel like you're not on top of all the information, as a lot of apps have a horrible information/space ratio and others (like the low fuel icon) are easy to miss. The 'Race Essentials' mod is a great, compact replacement for a vast amount of UI elements. I also advise getting 'HeliCorsa' to help with the peripheral vision that you're missing on a single screen.
- Ranked multiplayer is missing by default. Low Fuel Motorsport is currently the most popular third party offering.
- There's no nighttime by default. There are mods that add full day cycles and are also supposed to add rain ('Sol' or the newer 'Pure'), but I've never bothered with them too much and don't know about the existence or quality of physics rain simulations.

Summary:
Assetto Corsa is so good at its core that, with the right mods, it's close to perfect. As long as none of the downsights are a criteria for exclusion, which they might very well be depending on what you want from a simracing game, this is probably the game you should get.

For me personally, the game has by far enough content (including the DLCs) and with all the third party options, I'm not missing default ranked multiplayer. The game only offering dry scenarios isn't as much of a bother to me as I thought it would be when I initially bought the game. However, not being able to add bots in my private 3-man-races is unfortunate. Also, the reliance of mods comes with the disadvantage that it can be hard to find good mods between masses of mod cars with completely nonsensical physics and settings, stolen content and other shady practices. All in all, these points are far from outweighing what is an amazing racing simulation.

4/5