We’ve now had plenty of time to spend in the driver's seat behind an array of vehicles in Project CARS 3. As we’ve worked our way into the later stages of the campaign and online play, we’ve gotten to see just how much things heat up as we go wide open on the throttle in ever faster cars, ever more intense competition, and the occasional curiosity.
We drove our way through everything from Road E racing up through Hypercars, which you can hear all about in our early campaign check-in here, Since then, we’ve stepped things up by driving in Project CARS 3’s GT class racing, Invitationals, and special Challenges.
When we first jumped into the GT class of racing, we knew we couldn’t leave our Mitsubishi Lancer that we’ve already taken from Class E up through Hypercars behind, so we used the in-game upgrades system to give it a racing conversion and take it into GT-C racing alongside our Corvette for GT-A racing. These races saw us going ever faster (though not so much in the slower GT C) and facing off against even more challenging competition. So, the more we raced, the better we had to get, especially as challenges in each race grew from the simple early tasks of mastering a couple corners or making a couple clean passes in a race to far trickier tasks like drafting an opponent for 25 seconds then overtaking them cleanly. The game requires you to improve as a driver to proceed, but all the lessons are built into the earlier races.
Past GT racing, Invitationals offered us ways to keep engaging in challenging races in areas where we’d already excelled. This mode includes special races that are unlocked by earning certain achievements throughout gameplay. Some events may be unlocked by winning a certain number of events using a car from one country while another event might require you to have completed numerous clean races.
Then there’s the Challenges mode, which keeps things interesting. Here, we had to be prepared for some less familiar racing situations, such as a Formula E race in a fully electric machine that handled like nothing we’d ever raced in before or a Super Truck race that we were utterly unprepared for after spending the entire game driving cars with ever lower centers of mass.
While the campaign mode offers no shortage of events to complete, they can eventually all be completed. That’s where online game modes come in to keep you challenged. Project CARS 3 includes some standard online competition with its Quick Play mode that’ll toss you into a race with other players at random. But, it also has Scheduled Events.
In Scheduled Events, you’ll be able to see what events are coming up, which course you’ll race on, and which type of car you’ll race in. You can sign up for the events ahead of time and then take to the track to set a qualifying time to move up your starting position in the grid or just get a feel for the road and the car. We drove into one Scheduled Event and spent the time before mastering the track in one car – that was an event we were ready for until we decided to switch to a “faster” car right as the event was going to start only to find the gearing so completely different that going in and out of each turn became an entirely new challenge. While we managed to pull it together after a few laps, it easily cost us a few positions, and it’s not a mistake we repeated.
Then there’s the Rivals mode. This sees you tackle a rotating set of daily, weekly, and monthly challenges. And, you only get a set number of attempts to earn your top score. In Rivals, you’ll get to see how your racing skills compare to the rest of the field, and you can even see what kind of controller and which assists other players are using. You’ll be thrown into a challenge, sometimes in a car or on a racetrack you’re less than familiar with, and you’ll see if you can muster a performance that puts you ahead of other racers. At the end, you’ll see the percentile your performance falls into against the rest of the Project CARS 3 community,
We popped in to tackle a few Rivals challenges and see where we stood. It was clear we needed to keep familiarizing ourselves with more cars and more tracks, as we struggled to break out of bronze in many challenges (though we didn’t always use the majority of the 30 chances some of the challenges offered). We did eventually find our sea legs, so to speak, in a rainy Rivals challenge. Having spent more than a few years driving through the throes of winter in real life, we were familiar enough with the control needed and tenderness toward the gas pedal to drive smoothly on less-than-ideal roadways. That helped us land a Rivals rank in the top 50% for the event in just one try. Of course, had we kept seeing how hard we could push each corner over multiple attempts, we might have ranked even higher.
And, if all the campaign events and online play ever feel like they’re leaving something lacking, there’s always the Custom Event mode. There you can set up whatever race you want, whether that be a dozen Formula E racing cars comically zooming around the almost absurdly small Knockhill Tri-Oval in the rain for 99 laps or some Super Trucks blasting their way through the city streets of Shanghai.
All that said, we’ve had plenty of time with Project CARS 3 and we still feel like we’ve only scratched the surface of all the racing experiences available, especially as we have yet to get behind the wheel of most of the games 200+ cars.