The biggest fault of any NASCAR game- well, one of the several big faults- so far has been the stupid and unrealistic AI. With NASCAR 14, developer Eutechnyx has largely done away with the issue. The AI in NASCAR 14 is a lot more aggressive than it has been in previous installments, and when you’re racing against computer controller opposition, you get the feeling that they actually competing for a win. Strategizing becomes that much more important due to the same reason, and makes the game much more fun and multi-layered in more ways than one.

"As any good racing sim should be, NASCAR 14 provides gamers a fair bit of challenge. Especially if it's the career mode you're playing."

However, the AI hasn’t been perfected completely. There are still some niggles that riddle the races of NASCAR 14- your competitors will crash and collide with you, no matter what lap of the race you’re currently on. Whether you’ve just started the race or are just a few dozen meters away from the finish line, your opponents will always drive forward with the same menacing mentality. While this gives the game a sense of urgency at times- which is oftentimes much appreciated, given how exciting it can make things- it makes for some unrealistic situations during races and can detract from the experience if you’re looking for realism and authenticity in vein of the Forza and WRC games.

This linear thinking pattern of the AI drivers also results in a bit of monotony later on in the game, and not only does it make the game a little boring as time wears on, it also gives you an unfair advantage no matter what difficulty setting you’re playing the game on. After a few hours, you’ll have memorized the way and patterns your opponents move in, and you’ll be beating them and winning races not because of skill, but, in large part, because you know what your opponents will do and when they’ll do it.

That doesn’t mean the game is easy, though. As any good racing sim should be, NASCAR 14 provides gamers a fair bit of challenge. Especially if it’s the career mode you’re playing. The career mode has been revamped in NASCAR 14, and you’ll be playing in an entire season, playing in races and practicing, earning money and building your dream car and crew to help you through the season. In the initial stages, the races are rather tough, simply because your car isn’t as good as those of your opponents, which means that strategizing is very important in these stages. However, as time goes on and you get better cars to drive, racing becomes a lot more balanced and, as a result, enjoyable.

"NASCAR 14 is, by all means, a huge improvement over its predecessors, and developer Eutechnyx have certainly set up a solid foundation to build its future games on."

When you’re not playing offline, you can head over online to play against your friends, either in a similar season setup or in single races. Online racing is extremely fun in NASCAR 14, largely because you don’t have to deal with the finicky AI. While there’s not as much complexity or depth here to keep you coming back as there is in the career mode offline, there’s still plenty of fun to be had while playing with your friends and you’ll find yourself playing online for several hours.

The technical side of the game is also a little iffy. The sound effects are, granted, very well done and give the game a nice, authentic feeling during races, pit stops and customization sections. Even the menus are crisp and clean. However, the visuals of the game themselves are a bit off the mark. While they’re not terrible or downright ugly by any means, they’re not up to the level of contemporary racers or contemporary HD video games in general. The textures get blown up and heavily pixelized when zoomed in on, and the frame rate stutters at times. The effects and the physics themselves are often hilariously inappropriate (a car spinning out of control at the slightest touch then balancing itself perfectly mere seconds later, for example), and glitches run aplenty. There’s certainly not enough of these technical errors for them to be a massive hindrance, but you do notice them and they do get in the way of your enjoyment.

NASCAR 14 is, by all means, a huge improvement over its predecessors, and developer Eutechnyx have certainly set up a solid foundation to build its future games on. They haven’t, however, managed to squash out all the faults and errors of the game, and as a result, NASCAR 14 is a flawed yet fun game that fans of the sport and the genre might want to try out.

This game was reviewed on the PC.

Developer of the upcoming racing sim NASCAR 14, Eutechnyx, has announced that it has laid off 12 of its employees as part of some restructuring work going on. Some of these 12 staff members have been loaned to Ubisoft studio Reflections.

Eutechnyx also closed its London offices, which contained five people, in June last year, but with 131 current employees and other sub-contractors working for the company, this all represents less than ten per cent of the number of people the company employes.

“On Friday, we made unfortunately 12 people redundant,” said Eutechnyx CEO Darren Jobling. “It was part of restructuring at the company.

“We’ve made no bones about the fact we wanted to move away from being a work-for-hire developer on consoles to publishing our own titles,” Jobling added, “so it’s highly regrettable that we did have to make 12 people redundant.”

Stay tuned for further updates on the story as more info comes our way.

[Develop]

“We’ve spent a lot of time developing new and compelling ways for racing fans to get involved and experience what it’s like to be part of NASCAR nation, from getting your car race ready to doing 500 miles around Daytona International Speedway.”

Nascar The Game 2013 will be available this Summer and can currently be pre-purchased on Steam with beta access. Nascar: Redline’s release date is to be announced.

Dubbed “May Madness”, it will offer up to 60 percent discounts on E-Buck purchases, thus allowing players to purchase upgrades, cars and other nifty additions in bulk.

There will also be daily discounts on different cars, offering up a different range of discounts for different vehicles for each day. This extends from the RA Class to the D Class vehicles.

Auto Club Revolution is a free to play, online multiplayer racing title. It supports several different modes of play, and boasts of tons of licensed vehicles and realistic physics. To check out the game today, head here. There are also updates on the game’s status available at the official site, with Eutechnyx adding new content on a regular basis.

To celebrate the commercial launch, Eutechnyx released an infographic video for the game. This video showcases the highlights and achievements of the team on the way towards launching. Check it out above, and marvel at some of the more interesting details celebrating the end of the beta.

Auto Club Revolution features a wide range of real-world cars and can be played here. For more inception on the game’s inception and plans for the future, check out our exclusive interview with COO of Eutechnyx Darren Jobling.

Chief Commercial Officer, Darren Jobling stated, “From the initial closed beta launch right through to our commercial release we’ve been taking our lead from the game’s beta test players adding and changing features accordingly, don’t expect this to change now we’re in commercial release. Our teams have long term plans for new content, new features and new initiatives which will cement Auto Club Revolution’s position at the top of the pile.”

The game has been in the beta phase since March 2012, during which the team collected a large amount of feedback to improve the experience from the more than 2.5 million races that have already taken place.. A special voucher will be distributed to beta players for unlocking an exclusive paint scheme when the game goes live.

Not a single one. But that is the nature of open world games and Ride to Hell is no different.

Playing as Jake Conway, you’ll be seeking revenge against The Devil’s Hand, a biker gang that we imagine has wronged young Conway in some form or manner. Set during the end of the 1960’s with the bare knuckled, beer swigging biker culture prevalent then, Ride to Hell: Retribution is slated to release on June 25th in North America and on June 28th in Europe for PS3, Xbox 360 and PC.

The most striking first impression of ACR is its format, coming in the form of a browser led menu system. All your lobbies, car customisation, leaderboards and store purchases are handled in your web browser. With so much information on hand, the system holds up surprisingly well. Everything is tabbed and categorised away to keep it organised, yet all necessary options and information are present without having to dig behind a slew of menus.

In order to get a proper race experience though, the actual gameplay takes place in a separate race app users must download. Once the race is over, you’re returned to the browser menus once more. This kind of dual app gameplay may seem gratuitous to some, but it does make for a much smoother racing experience. The race app does a great job when it comes to the visuals, looking crisp on higher settings. Though the graphics get a boost from the race app, the jump between browser and program can take some time. Races can take a while to load as a result, a wait that is emphasised if the servers aren’t playing nice on a given day.

That said, once you’re in a race, the extra load time is often worth it. The physics, weight and realism add up to a satisfying driving experience, one where true skill and judgement is demanded of the player. New players aren’t going to be totally turned away by the challenge of the basic driving mechanics though, as a variety of driver assistance is available (unless you access a server that specifically turns them off). From automatic breaking to traction aids, assists culminate in the form of a driving line shown in the hud to help newcomers better anticipate sharp corners. It helps expand the appeal of the game, but without ever being overly patronising or limiting player agency.

What may intimidate newcomers is the sheer amount of real world cars and tracks on offer. I’m not exactly the most clued up when it comes to cars and the like, but even I recognise some of the bigger names in here. There are already a huge amount of vehicles, with more being added by the ever vigilant Eutechnyx team each week. Vehicles are divided up into classes to help you build up your collection slowly, and you can only get access to higher class vehicles as you level up over your racing career. To help you in this endeavour, every vehicle has a set of challenges that award you with exp and in-game credits, further bolstered by a recurring daily challenge. It becomes quite addictive just pursuing these, though they are often quite easily won.

All cars are given a VPR (vehicle performance rating) based on their stats, and you can boost a vehicle’s VPR through a variety of upgrades. The lower class cars will have a max VPR you can reach of course, but the amount of customisation is impressive, and the fact that all the upgrade parts are also fully licensed is yet another feather in Auto Club Revolution’s cap. The game also does a good job of warning you if you’re upgrades are going to seriously imbalance the car’s performance, though there were times where, in my total lack of automobile knowledge, I was still easily able to damage my car’s traction through gratuitous engine upgrades. The warnings are noob friendly, but clearly not that noob friendly.

Alongside the vehicle upgrades are a plethora of other cosmetic alterations you can make for each vehicle. The variation is staggering, with even more additions promised in the future. All these extras can be costly, but you have the option of paying for most items using either in-game credits or real world currency converted into ACR’s E-bucks. In a preview demonstration we were kindly given, Eutechnyx senior marketing manager Dan Robinson assured us that it isn’t a pay to win situation with regards to purchasing better cars and parts. Naturally though, as with all titles that use micro-transaction models, trying to buy some of the pricier cars with credits alone would be hugely tedious, especially when you only earn a meagre few hundred credits for each race.

Where credits become more forthcoming is when you get involved in an auto club. Working like guild systems you see in other MMO titles, auto clubs offer you a new range of activities to complete with others and, with a shared exp pool all club members contribute to, you can also level up your club to get new social options and features. These social systems are fairly robust and, with recommended friends popping up on the ACR home menu, it’s definitely a game that promotes the social side of racing. You can also communicate with the huge hangout lobbies you launch games from, further promoting community interaction.

The netcode itself seem solid, with games rarely suffering from any kind of lag. An issue can occur though regarding actually joining games. On a fair few times online matches just failed to load me in, resulting in a long loading screen followed by a “did not finish” result. It was frustrating just how many times this happened, but it’s a glitch that will hopefully be resolved before ACR comes out of beta.

It’s great to see a realistic racing title take the free to play business model with such gusto. The sheer variety of cars is likely to make motor fans dribble with anticipation and the online matches remain balanced by the robust matchmaking achieved through vehicle VPR ratings. There are of course a few glitches still in the beta that will hopefully get worked out, along with a host of features merely marked as “coming soon.” That said, with its solid racing engine, wide support support for various controllers and wheels and huge amount of free content, ACR may well turn the PC into the new home of the racing simulator.

For more about the game, you can visit the official website over here.

Executive Producer Christoph Vietzke stated that, “Auto Club Revolution has reached an unprecedented level of game and manufacturer collaboration, pioneering real and virtual car launches. We are the partner of choice for BMW and many other manufacturers because they know Auto Club Revolution is ‘the place’ for car and racing fans alike.”

Players will be able to pre-order the Z4 from April 11th onwards. The first 200 pre-orders will receive the Z4 on April 17th, as the car releases on April 24th for the general public. So there’s that one week advantage for the lucky 200.

For more information on the free to play racing simulator, check out our interview with Eutechnyx CEO Darren Jobling

The packs in question include the Daytona 500 Pack, where you play take part in the 2013 Daytona 500; the Subway Fresh Fit 500 Pack, where you play as Montoya finding his groove again, Martin taking on the youngsters and much more; the Kobalt Tools 400 Pack, which takes place at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway; and the Auto Club 400 Pack where you play as Dale Jr. and help Kyle clench the victory.

Each week after a new race, a new Inside Highlights pack will be available in game via the ticket currency. Each pack will cost 20 Tickets with paint schemes costing 10 Tickets.

You can also purchase the DLC Season Pass for only $24.99 or 2000 Microsoft Points to gain access to the Inside Highlights packs and paint jobs as they’re released.