TOCA Race Driver 2 Review (no fat)

Game Description

Every few weeks, there's a new game putting you behind a driving wheel. Big cars, small cars, remote control cars, Formula 1 cars, GT cars, trucks, karts, wacky cars. TOCA Race Driver 2 is picks up from where its predecessor left, even as it appears as a polished and carefully designed game.

TOCA Race Driver 2 Gameplay

TOCA Race Driver 2 is not exactly your average racing game. The racing is here, but the perspective is different. The highlight of the game is the career mode. Codemasters decided to add some depth in their career mode, and literally turned it into a plot-driven driven game.

Dust and Men

When you start off, you're a beginner (but promising) pilot, with a wonderful looking agent, ready to battle for the world title along with much more. The career itself is a whole story, with cinematic cut-scenes and well-contoured characters. It may seem a little bit too much for avid racing fans who really want nothing but races, but it's not what could be called a bad choice. It's an interesting experiment that some of you may even like.

Aside from the cinematics, everything happens on the track, and the first thing you will notice is the high degree of realism included in Codemasters' game. Each car handles differently, and the characteristics of a car make it behave differently on different grounds. The physics engine is a very good imitation of the reality: light cars trying to enter a powerslide at high speeds will end up spinning, and heavy cars will barely make it out of tight curves at high speeds. Front-wheel drives have a distinct handling from rear-wheel drives, and so on.

Bashing your car against all the walls may have more disastrous effects as compared to other games. The damage system is one of the most realistic you have encountered yet. There is a comprehensive set of damage meters that can tell you at every moment what is wrong with the condition of a car, and, based on that, you can (and you should) adjust your driving technique. If you don't, you may find yourself failing to finish a race because of a mechanical problem. Even a gentle touch against another car is dangerous, so you probably realize that hitting a tree at full speed is a (bad) way to finish the race.

Finishing the race is hard enough anyway, but finishing it in the lead is even more challenging. There can be as many as 21 cars on the track simultaneously…all with excellent AI. The virtual pilots are very realistic: they have their own personalities, their own driving style and their own favorite techniques.

Cars, Mechanics and Tracks

There is much delight for motor heads in Race Driver 2. The car tuning system is very comprehensive and very powerful. You will be able to change just about every detail of your car's configuration; from the type of the tires to the ride height, gear ratio and brake bias. However, this is done at the cost of a cluttered interface, which is a generalized problem in fact: the interface feels clumsy, overcrowded and sometimes not too intuitive in just about every menu, not just the one referring to car tuning.

Each one of the 35 cars can be tuned just as you like it, and modifying the likes of Aston Martin Vanquish or Nissan Skyline GT-R feels great. The cars look excellent, both on and off the track…as long as you don't run into every obstacle on the track.

The track locations are varied and realistic. Most of them are licensed tracks from 31 different locations, including the Hockenheim circuit from Germany's DTM series. Some tracks are fictive, though, but the designers did a good job with them.

TOCA Race Driver 2 Multiplayer Gameplay

If you feel that single player is not good enough for you, the multiplayer mode will provide you some challenge. Multiplayer is limited to only 12 human players, although additional AI-controlled drivers can be included. You can choose either a Quick Match, or an OptiMatch, where you can customize several parameters. OptiMatch gives you the ability to race in special conditions, like a Rated Session or a Collision Mode, and allows extensive car tuning.

TOCA Race Driver 2 Graphics and Sound

Artistically speaking, TOCA Race Driver 2 is not necessarily impressive, but this is not a way of saying that it looks average. The tracks feel very real and are rendered very nicely, although the texture quality is not impressive. Less impressive than the textures are the trees, stone-age sprites in fact, and the grass, which looks more like green sheets of paper than grass. Nevertheless, it's not too disturbing as you will rarely see grass and trees at speeds lower than 30 km/h.

The sound is exactly what you expected. There are engine noises, brake roars and so on, the typical orchestra of a driving game. Each engine has its own distinct feeling though, and the audio team should get some credit for the audio tracks.

TOCA Race Driver 2 - Value

With over eights hours of career mode, 12 player multiplayer mode and a great driving experience to boot, TOCA Race Driver 2 is one game a racing fan shouldn’t miss out on.

TOCA Race Driver 2 Price

You can get TOCA Race Driver 2 for 21.99$ US.