Looking at this website it is not going to be a surprise when i tell you that we like the neon design of Retrowave/Synthwave themed elements. Should you think the same then i have great news for you! A new update to the popular racing game Forza Horizon 5 now brings a classical and flashy stereotypical element of the Retrowave design to the Forza Highway.

New Cars

On 17th May Playground games released the specially designed highway part together with six new cars in a Forza Horizon 5 Update. Two of these are available through the newly started series. With 80 points you get the Hyundai N Vision, a Korean hydrogen/electric powered sports car that takes generally design elements from the original DeLorean DMC12. It fits perfectly into a retrowave 80s themed release. For double the points you can get the DeLoreain DMC itself through the Forza Horizon Playlist challenges.

Apart from these two you can also get the new Lamborghini Countach, a classic 80s car rebooted to today design standards, the BMW M635, the Lotus Esprit Turbo and the Citroen BX 4TC.

New location

The area around the street racing festival has been modified with neon lights on everything to look like the neo futuristic synth utopias you can find on many digital art pieces. Driving through the light tunnel installed on the highway looks great and is real fun. Thanks to Forzas amazing lighting and ray tracing engines this whole installation looks awesome at night and blends well with Forzas rather realistic graphics approach.

To enjoy all the neon the night cycles are also longer. You also get the classical retrowave sun in form of a drone show above the highway. Furthermore the radio stations have also been updated and now sync fitting music to the neon lighting while you drive through them. All in all a very well made and fun experience that blasts you back into the past.

While playing around with the different available car configurations in your favorite racing game like Forza Horizon you will probably reach the point of wanting a bit more realism. Especially if you are equipping Drifting or Offroading gear boxes. A popular and easy way of addressing this issue is the change of your sim shifter plate against one with the right amount of gears that matches your configuration in the game.

Hyped by this easy sounding option you will then soon be disappointed as you go online to find that these alternative plates cost you a fortune.

A few weeks ago we ourselves where standing at the same dilemma situation which is why we came up with the idea of designing our own shifter plates! Our version is designed to be printed with a 3D printer to allow for individual customizability and a cheap and easy production. The parts are designed to fit perfectly to the popular Thrustmaster TH8A shifter. To install them you simply remove the four screws of the original plate and swap it for your fresh new one.

Get yours here!

No 3D printer? No Problem!

Should you not have a 3D printer at home do not fear, we also got you covered!

Please write us a short Email to lj.server.info@gmail.com and we will try to send the printed parts for 5$ + shipping to your location.

Not your desired plate? Also no problem!

If you have a request for a plate with a special gear arrangement just write us a email to lj.server.info@gmail.com and we will try to add it to our range.

Go achievement hunting

Drift86 offers 41 steam achievements which can be grouped in different difficulty categories. Most of them are pretty easy to complete while others can be a bit challenging, especially the “earn 1 million drift score in one combo” achievement. These offer a cool challenge to complete with friends. Check out the article we wrote about how to get all achievements with ease here.

Join community tournaments

On the community discords of Drift86 you can participate in tournaments that take place every month. You can sometimes even win prices. These tournaments have different winning requirements and rules. Check out the discord servers below to get in touch with the community.

Compete with the best

Try speedrunning tracks in the game. There is a whole community that strives to complete the tracks as fast as possible.

I would suggest joining the discord servers mentioned above to get in touch with the community and get introduced to basic rules. You can check out the best times that were approved by the speedrun.com admins with the button below.

Keep in mind that you need to record your runs to submit them so maybe pick up a classic speedrunning tool called LiveSplit to integrate a timer in your recording. There are also preset categories for Drift86 that were put into the LiveSplit menu.

Let us know whats your favorite thing to do in Drift86 in the comments below!

Steamdeck – 10%

Did you know that you can also buy hardware directly on steam? Well even if you didn’t, the Steamdeck might be worth a look with a price reduction of -10% bringing the portable game console down to 377,10 €. It offers the possibility to play PC games on the go in a Nintendo Switch Like Design but with enough power to run even titles like GTAV smoothly thanks to its advanced AMD integrated GPU.

Elden Ring – 30%

Elden Ring is a great fantasy action RPG from the creators of Dark Souls (also discount of 50%). In the game you play as an outcast who returns to the lands between, a world shattered by the breaking of the Elden Ring, the source of all life. You must explore a vast open world and fight back fearsome enemies using your increasingly more powerful weapons. Don’t miss on this adventurist classic of RPG games now with 30% discount bringing it down to 41,99€.

Atomic Heart – 34%

Atomic Heart plays in an alternate history of a retrofuturistic Soviet Union. You play as a special agent who must investigate an incident at a secret facility. In your first person view shooter experience you will face mutant creatures, terrifying machines and superpowered robots that have gone rogue. To battle these forces you are given an experimental power glove and cutting edge weapons to survive in your ruthless environment. Atomic Heart is a game of horror, action and adventure. It is currently on discount by 34% resulting in a price of 39,59€.

Forza Horizon 5 – 50%

If you are searching for a racing game, look no further! Forza Horizon offers a large amount of cars and tuning capabilities to choose from and many different game modes and themes within the car communities (Drifting, Rally, etc). Furthermore this great experience is wrapped in stunning graphics making Forza Horizon one of the nicest games to look at. Should you be interested in Forza, check out or in depth review of it. Forza Horizon 5 is currently of by 50% bringing its price down to 29,99€.

Subnautica – 67%

Subnautica is an underwater adventure and survival game taking place on an alien ocean planet. To survive you have to craft equipment, pilot submarines and avoid harsh wild life as you explore the depths of a massive open world full of wonder and mystery. You will discover coral reefs, volcanoes, care systems and more while trying to uncover the unknown around you. You can now get this great exploration and creative game with a 67% discount resulting in a price drop to 9,98€.

Need for speed Unbound – 70%

Need for Speed Unbound is a racing game offering classic street races in combination with many customization and tuning options. You will find yourself racing against time, the police and take on weekly qualifiers to reach ultimate street racing challenges. The customization options are endless and allow you to fit the ride to your individual style by changing lights, colors and body. NFS Unbound is classic racing game delivering adrenaline and speed with a discount of 70% putting it at 20,99€.

Valve Complete Pack – 96%

Most of you probably already have this steal of a pack with 96% discount, so this rather suited for the beginners on Steam. The valve complete pack includes every game Valve the company behind Steam has released so far. This includes absolute classic such as Half Life one and two and the greatest puzzle games around: the Portal series. Furthermore the included Left4Dead series is worth checking out. There are also lot of older games included here but only for these six games it is already worth it to invest the 5,96€ for this great deal.

DISCLAIMER: There will be some story spoilers in the mission summaries.

The missions are given to you by Agent ULP situated at the yellow U in the middle of Los Santos. You as a player are hired as a IAA field operative to investigate, if the Duggan Family, some corrupt petrochemical magnates, has influenced oil prices. The family was first introduced to the game with the Diamond Casino & Resort update.

If you play through these chronologically this is the correct order:

• ULP – Intelligence
• ULP – Counterintelligence
• ULP – Extraction
• ULP – Asset Seizure
• ULP – Operation Paper Trail
• ULP – Cleanup

1. ULP – Cleanup

The Cleanup mission is the last of the 6 part story. The danger of an economic influence by the Duggans is over but you have to destroy the last backups inside a bunker in the mountains. Once you’re inside the bunker you’ll first have to restore the power before deleting backups from servers and saving it on your phone. While hacking the second server a failsafe mechanism is activated that leads to the players being attacked by juggernauts scattered throughout the complex. Complete the deletion proress and go outside where you need to take out a chopper before escaping to a IAA guarded location while being followed by enemies.

This mission is lots of fun but also quite scary when you’re playing it for the first time as the “sleeping juggernauts” at the beginning of the mission are master in scaring the sh*t out of you. Fighting your way through the bunker complex while hacking the servers really was a amazing end to the mission series.

2. ULP – Operation Paper Trail

ULP informs the players that they need to prevent a deal between the FIB and the Duggans that want to purchase a backup of Clifford, an AI to manipulate the market. You need to fight your way through a construction site and reach the top of a sky scraper. You can complete parts of the mission in stealth which makes it easier as the enemies don’t know you’re coming but you can also shoot everything in your sight. At the top of the building Mason Duggan is escaping with a helicopter. You need to follow him to another location where you need to take out more guards, eliminate him and drop off the briefcase with the backup to the IAA.

This is the challenging mission of all 6 as you really need to time your attacks if you want to complete the mission in stealth. Especially the fighting parts inside the building are quite hard to complete stealthy as there are enemies everywhere. What we really enjoy about the mission is that you get to jump of the sky scraper before following Mason Duggans helicopter. (Keep in mind that you need to press the left mouse button not the space bar to activate your parachute )

3. ULP – Counterintelligence

To gain more information about the FIB interactions you are tasked to hack some drones which will give you the location of a secret base. The traces lead the player to a motel where he needs to hack another computer. ULP realises too late that the base was a trap and the players are knocked out by gas. In the second half of the mission you need to drive a van with a bomb to a drop-off point while one player needs to defuse a bomb that was place inside the van.

This mission is quite boring at the start but the minigame at the end is quite fun. The first time we got trapped in the motel we where really surprised.

4. ULP – Intelligence

This missions introduces you to the ranks of the IAA with a pretty funny cutscene. After that you are tasked to steal intelligence from Mason Duggan through hacking his laptop. During the procress you learn that the Duggans made a deal with the FIB and two locations are displayed where you need to steal 2 hardware pieces each. After stealing all 4 of them you need to deliver them to the IAA.

What we really enjoyed about the missions is the inflitration of the FIB HQ, one of the hardware locations, where you have to disguise yourself and stealthly search through some heavily guarded offices. You need to approach situations tactically under the pressure of risking to trigger an alarm. The other location on the other hand is quite boring in comparison as you only need to enter a warehouse and shoot your way out of it at the end (if you fail to turn off the alarm first).

5. ULP – Asset Seizure

The Duggans want to relocate an AI which is used to manipulate the oil enconomy to a new location. The players first need to destroy 5 guarded signal jammers before securing a van with the equipment and delivering it to a drop off point.

The missions can be completed rather quickly if you’re playing with a full squad of friends but you need to watch out for the exploding signal jammers. Some locations are a pain in the ass to get to while other are really easy to complete. Nonetheless the final journey with the van is fun as you need to deal with pursuing Duggan members.

6. ULP – Extraction

The players are tasked to locate Agent Johnson, an undercover agent that stopped responding. You first need to search for coordinates in her garage and look for clues at different locations before driving to a final location. There you need to take car of enemies involved in a shootout between the Duggans and cartel soldiers while looking for Johnson. After the battle you need to loose your wanted level and transport the agent to the hospital.

The missions feels boring as it doesn’t reveal lots of new plot and also doesn’t involve much action except the shootout.

Conclusion

Most of the ULP missions are lots of fun but some of them are quite boring. The whole story is really interesting as it describes a scenario that might happen in the near future. The missions are defenitely worth a playthrough but not really made to grind for money as long as they aren’t boosted for double rp and money as they only give around 20.000$ each.

Let us know your personal ranking of the ULP missions.

If you’re thinking about completing a lot of achievements at once keep in mind that restarting the game is needed for the car related achievements and that you need to press on statistics in the main menu to get certain achievements

Simple action-based achievements

Most achievements can be easily acquired through just completing a simple task. These include all 28 “Play with the CAR” achievements. Keep in mind these are just for the non-DLC cars

HOW TO COMPLETE?

1. Select the singleplayer option in the main menu
2. Choose the first map, “racetrack”
3. Select the car you want the achievement for
4. Start the race and drive for some meters
5. Earn achievement
6. Restart game and start again at point 1 for achievements

The “Singplayer” and “Multiplayer” achievements can be earned by playing one race in Singleplayer and by joining one of the public servers through the multiplayer option.

Another one is the “Sociable”-achievement that can be achieved by creating a multiplayer room.

HOW TO COMPLETE:

1. Select the multiplayer option in the main menu
2. Select the custom server option
3. On the right click on create room
4. Wait for other people to join if you want to play with friends

Time-based achievements

Both the “Itsuski”, “Takumi” and “Bunta” achievements are based on race time. To increase your race time either just play normally or start a race without AI and let the game run in the background.

Skill-based achievements

There are two types of achievements based on skill: the total drift score and the drift score reached in one combo. To improve your total drift score you just need to drift and complete races. Total drift score achievements will be unlocked just through playing normally after some time.

• Both the 50k and 100k drift score achievements can be easily earned on the first map: “racetrack” with any car. Just watch out to not touch the barriers as that will reset your score.
• 500k and 1M drift score in one combo are the hardest achievements. They can either be completed on the mountain pass maps like “gunma”, “snowy country” or “the hill” if you’re skilled enough to hold longs drifts and reach the 9 combo score quickly. The problem here is mostly the U-turn at the end of a map if it includes a downhill and uphill part.
  As an alternative just load up a the “park” map in multiplayer and use a high power vehicle to be able to continue your drift on the grass. Try using the “musclecar 1969” or the “roadster” if you have the car DLC. The “forf 1965” also has lots of power but is quite hard to control because of its mass. Keep in mind that you earn combo points and score faster in multiplayer but you also loose your combo faster. Good luck!

Get Drift 86 here

If you somehow ended up here without knowing what Drift86 is check out our review about it or how you can make your own liveries in Drift86. Interested in the game? Check it out here on steam.

Secrets paths – alternative routes

Racetrack: You can drift around the cones in the pits if you turn left right before the finish line.

Gunma: Right before the first small corner you can go left into a small path.

Gunma 2: There are multiple small passages on the track that are driveable like the front yards of some houses along the track or areas behind the yellow barriers that can be reached by going around the barriers either by jumping or just driving offroad through the nearest gap in the fence on each side of the road.

Here we found some houses where you can drift around. This can be quite tricky as there isn’t really much space. The entrance can be found if you drive uphill on your right side.

Drift Track: After the middle section of the track there is a red entry forbidden sign. Against your first impulse you can actually drive that part of the track as well.

Freedrift: If you spawn in just go forward until you see an opening to your right. Go there and you can explore all of the beautiful environment around the main course.

Freedrift – Countryside: If you turn around after spawning and take the next right you’ll find a gap in the fence on your left. Go in there and you are presented with a nice ramp to jump of.

Secret features – Funny glitches:

Gunma: After spawning at the top of the mountain, turn around and drive until you reach the barrier blocking the road, turn left and go under the parking lot. Continue driving under the parking spaces until you reach the end of the lot and you’ll get pushed into the air.

If you know any other cool spots on the different maps in Drift86 feel free to write a comment and we’ll credit and implement your addition. Thanks for reading!

The second Forza Horizon 5 Rally Adventure expansion was released on March 29th. It introduced a new race style to FH5: rally races. You can now explore the “Sierra Nueva”, an area on the northwest coast of the map. The DLC includes a new map, new cars, new apparel rewards and lots of achievements, accolades and other tasks to complete. If you are generally interested check out our general review about FH5 or some stickers we made for your cars.

Things I like

The Rally Adventure expansion brought a new experience to FH5. Especially for me as I mostly avoided doing offroad-racing before. Unexpectedly the cars given to you handle quite well and I had close to no problems driving offroad with a steering wheel controller. If you drive with really powerful cars sand and dirt tends to be a problem but with just normal C to A class cars this was really enjoyable.

The rally stages are well put together and the environment feels different on each one of them. There are 3 different types: dirt, road and night rally races. My favorite one at the beginning where the street rally races as there wasn’t much of a difference to what I was used to. Throughout my playthrough this changed as I really got to like the classic dirt, offroad rally stages. Playing with a low powered front wheel drive car was really nice and learning how to drive on dirt was a lot of fun. The night rally races are a mixture off both but just in the dark as the name suggests. I sometimes found myself braking too late unable to see the barriers.

Content-wise there are around 8 races to complete for each type and I would guess around 15-20 open-world activities (like speed traps, danger signs, etc) to do. I played for around 7-8h to get all teams to level 9 (not including exploring the map). This is enough to unlock the very own Goliath rally race. This also was the first race I struggled to keep up with the AI-drivers. After team-level 9 you still have to complete small tasks to reach the final level.

There are also lots of task to complete to rank up the different teams. Just driving around I found some nice places and also some collectables similar to the base game. The map feels big although I would guess it’s only 1/4 of the base game map.

Talking about the ranking system: I really enjoyed ranking up as it happens mostly unnoticed just by playing through the different races. This removes the “grindy” feeling and just opens the opportunity to go to rank 10 for those who want to grind through tasks. This expansion also added around 30 new steam achievements and more than 10 ingame accolades. I’ll talk about the problem with these later.

Check out the official map here:

Things I don’t like

The expansion feels a lot like starting out in FH5 again. The humor and accents is still the same and it still gets annoying after some time. Story-wise there isn’t much to talk about or at least I can’t remember anything else than going to a new place as a superstar to learn about rallying. But in my opinion the story never played an important role in the Forza Horizon franchise.

“Story races” themself are fun to play through although you are basically getting a gifted win (I talked about this in my FH5 review in depth) and they also include the typical unrealistic jumps. But you can earn new cars through completing them so I’m not complaining. A exception to this rule is the last race you unlock by reaching level 9 in all teams.

There are also similar bugs to the base game: You receive steam achievements and somehow complete task you never completed or started. Xbox achievements and steam achievements don’t match and the counter for collectables isn’t working as well. Sure this is only a minor bug but as someone who likes earning achievements themself, getting a “Drive on all roads” achievement 30 minutes into playing just doesn’t feel good.

Gameplay-wise there are also some things I want to mention: when racing with higher class cars with more speed some pace notes are played too late and you find yourself crashing into the barrier or sliding off the track. Another annoying thing is the helicopter flying above as its way too loud for my taste and I can’t hear my car properly.

As in the base game the 3 stars requirements on danger signs or speed traps are irregular and multiple tries are needed to complete one while other are completed just by driving normally. Again not a big problem just a small inconvenience.

Conclusion

If you want a simpler games and you like drifting check out our articles about drift games.

Get the FH5 rally expansion here

Beautiful sunsets on the touge – Game appearance

The graphics are quite realistic but nothing comparable to game like Forza Horizon 5. The textures are well made and buildings don’t feel repetitive. There are some flat walls with just an image on them which feels a bit out of place. Sometimes you can see through walls when you crash and at some places there are really small holes in objects.

The cars look realistic and especially the lighting by the brake and indicator lights look very nice.

Another well executed thing is the day and night cycle: while you’re drifting up and down the mountain roads the light situation changes and you’ll have to turn on your lights to see.

You can choose between third person, first person and a cinematic perspective. Sadly if you’re playing in third person there is no driver model sitting in the car.

Up and Down and Up and Down and … – Gameplay experience

The basis repetitive gameplay idea consists of driving up and down 4 different mountain roads on 4 different maps. You are a tofu delivery driver and need to get tofu from point A to B as fast as possible. By completing deliveries you earn money. The amount of money that you receive is very small (it took me around 1h to get another car for 1k) so you’ll have to spend some time grinding the deliveries if you want a nicer looking more expensive car.

If you meet other players you can race against them. The race just takes you downhill on the map you are currently on. Other player could drive on the same road but can’t bump into you or your opponent.

The roads themself have a nice layout and some of them are based on real roads. Sadly there are only mountain roads at the moment and the city street sections are quite small. When you want to travel to a different map you first need to find the travel point to that map inside another map. This and the fact that some maps have buildings like the garage or the car dealer and others don’t is quite annoying. Another thing that is confusing is the yellow barriers at intersections: the map continues there but you can’t go there because the maps ends. Invisible walls are also placed over some greenery sections that at first seem fine to drive over.

Drifting in Initial Drift Online is way harder than for example in Drift86 where the car just goes sideways no matter what you do. Here you have to pull your handbrake to start a drift and with lots of luck and practice you can get a clean drift using nitro. Nitro just gives your car a power boost and can be helpful to get speeds out of corners. This works well until you get to the maps with lots of hairpin corners where I for example misjudge the distance at which I need to start braking a lot.

If you crashed (which happens a lot before you get to know the controls) you can reset your car with the R key or the game does it for you. Sometimes you get put on the track facing the wrong way which is annoying if you continue driving in that direction without remembering which direction you initially wanted to go.

New cars and liveries can be purchased at the car dealer and there are 22 of them when publishing this review. They are well designed and can be upgraded in performance categories at the garage. You can customize your car appearance like the headlight and underbody lighting, the color of you car and your spoiler at other tuning shop around the different maps.

Do X Y times – Grind

While just drifting around is quite fun in the game the achievements themself are hard to earn. There are 36 of them and 4 of them require you to travel up and down the mountain for each map. Others like the 100 driving time or earning 100k are the same. As I mentioned above this feels unnecessary and just takes way too long for the casual gamer to complete.

Conclusion

Get Initial Drift Online here

Forza Horizon 5 (FH5) was published in late 2021 and is developed by Playground Games. The game was crowned IGN’s game of the year 2021. In this review we will express our view on and experiences with FH5.

My friend and I both bought the Forza Horizon 5 base game on sale for 40€ on steam. The normal price is around 60€ but you can it for less on third party reseller websites. There are 2 expansions available so far. We created a review about the Rally expansion.

Game appearance and sound design

Let’s start with the first thing you notice when booting up the game: the graphics are really awesome. This somehow feels unnatural as FH5 compared to other titles in the genre like Asseto Corsa has a very good appearance out of the box and doesn’t rely on mods. Playing in first person feels immersive and close to real life even on lower end graphic settings. The cinematic looking cutscenes are also really well made.

The car sounds feel realistic and also quite different when trying different cars and engine swaps. The sound design is complete by a variety of radio stations to listen to. The game navigation system also has a assistant that helps you with missions and navigating the big map. After some time this can feel like a nuisance when you get to know the environment.

Turn the leafblower off – Hardware requirements

As you possibly already guessed the game uses a lot of your hardware performance. On the medium preset it’s using around 25% of my cpu (AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX) and around 10% of gpu performance (Nvidia Geforce Rtx 3060 Laptop). The biggest problem for me is that its using around 9 of my 16gb ram which leads to a pretty noisy environment and sometimes performance issues when running other programs like discord or a browser window in the background.

Too much to progress – Game content

Open-world

Speaking of the environment: The game is situated in Mexico during the Horizon Festival. You as a player go there as a superstar to complete races and other events. This feels weird, especially when this is your first Forza Horizon game (as in my case) and you never experienced the story in the previous parts.

The variety is amazing: After around 100h of playtime I still had enough activities on my map waiting to be completed. On the FH5 map you can find a big highway, multiple tropical forests, a big volcano with mountain roads and roads near the ocean or with others words: basically everything for street and offroad racing. Sadly there isn’t a big city or a big snowy area (yet).

The main open world activities include: speed traps, speed zones, danger signs and more. The goal here is either to go fast from one point to another or to jump the furthest. Most of the time you complete these by just traveling around Mexico. They might not be the most fun thing but chasing highscores of your friends definitely can lead to some epic rivalries.

Other than open-world activities there are Road, Street, Dirt, Drag and Cross Country Races. They either take you around a course for 3 laps or along a certain path. The way they are designed feels quite forgiving: even if you brake to early or crash into a barrier you still have enough possibilities to overtake and win. (At least on lower end difficulties). What’s also cool is the event lab where you can play races designed by other players which are a lot of fun and sometimes even help you complete certain achievements.

Another useful and also pretty unique feature which can destroy the illusion of reality ingame is the rewind feature. After you press a certain key you can rewind back a few seconds to correct racing mistakes. This can be deactivated in the difficulty settings.

Collectibles and progress

There is a useful fast travel feature but it’s locked behind 50 fast travel boards which are placed all around the map and need to be destroyed. After unlocking fast travel you can buy a certain house on the map to travel for free. There are 7 houses to buy in total and they can be bought for around 100k to 2M. Choosing one as your home will give you some little advantages.

Talking about collectibles: there are also 14 barn finds where you need to find a barn in a unknown location. You can get some rare cars there after getting a tip for the rough location. Similarly to the fast travel boards there are also xp boards which reward you with a small amount of Experience points as the name suggests.

Experience points grant you level ups which reward you wheelspins. These give you a chance to win new cars, money and character clothing. There are two kinds: Normal wheelspins and super wheelspins which are basically 3 normal ones.

Other than that levels in FH5 don’t really mean that much as they can be bought over third party “shady” websites and don’t determine the skill of a player.

Car customization and liveries

As with the racing activities there is also a great variety of appearance customization for most of the cars. All of them have the same basic options for performance tuning and there is also a menu for fine tuning. Although this can be fun to play around with I recommend either searching for build of your favorite cars on youtube or just using the tuning setting provided by other people ingame.

The livery editor feels like hell when you start your journey but after getting used to it it’s fun to work with. You can put either self-made stickers, public stickers or “regular” shapes and letter on your car to achieve your style. I already spend around 10 hours just putting together logos and experimenting with colors and shapes. We also made some cool stickers and liveries for you to use.

Kissing the barriers – Difficulty

As there is an extra difficulty setting this is explained rather quickly. Let’s say you lost your last race and felt like it was too challenging: Just turn the difficulty down. Want to have a challenge: turn it up. This gets really ridiculous to a point where you can drive against the race barrier to turn into a corner and still be able to beat the slower AI-cars. Obviously at the high end of the difficulty spectrum its the same: without using ramming as a way to overtake you will hardly make it.

The AI drivers feel balanced (on their difficulty level) until you notice their small flaws. They often brake early and sometimes literally brake a few meters in front of the finish line so you magically win and have a sense of achievement. For me this feels this has quite the opposite effect as I do know I wouldn’t have won it the game didn’t made me. Also AI-driver for some reason do not care if they hit you in corners which quickly leads to an off-road adventure and lots or reset-button presses.

The difficulty in multiplayer or coop-races feels really different: when you are playing against other humans they aren’t as predictable as their computer-driven counterparts and people tend to ram you off the track almost every time. From my experience multiplayer is only fun when playing with friends and I only find myself doing it when I need it for certain quests or challenges.

Collecting some shiny medals – Grind

Speaking of quests and challenges… Grinding leaderboards for speed traps, jumps or any kind of open world activity is unnecessary as Playground Games apparently doesn’t feel like removing scores achieved by hackers and people using glitches which leads to a complete mess. You can’t really compare your achieved time/speed/flight distance to real player other than your friends.

Accolades are basically small achievements you can earn for every aspect of the game. Grinding them is a lot of fun especially when you see the result in a completed category. There are 2014 of them (at least now in March 2023) and some are hard to achieve while others are gained by just playing the game.

If you’re planing to play the game on steam there are 97 achievements to unlock but around a fifth of them are locked behind the hotwheels expansion. (there will probably be more achievements added with the new rally expansion)

The real grind begins with the seasonal challenges: Logging in to complete the same basic tasks over and over again isn’t the most fun to do. The rewards you get are often quite basic and not worth the effort spending hours of your precious gaming time with the provided task. But I do need to say sometimes you can find some gems in the reward section that are worth the time.

I don’t care about Papa Fernando! – Story

The story lines are there but I never really felt attached to the characters and it feels more like a task you need to complete to progress rather than a thing I want to do. I would say that the main reason for that are the unbalanced 3 star times the game wants you to achieve. Sometimes you have half the time left and sometimes you need to try certain missions over and over again to get the 3 stars. Also the dialogue most of the times feels annoying and unnecessary as the tasks you need to complete are very similar and self explained.

Although there are annoying points the story missions are really valuable to complete as they are lots of accolades to get and for each story line there are a few which have car rewards. These cars are story related and you can even get the fastest car ingame, the Koenigsegg Jesko by completing the “V10” story mission where you’re a stunt double for an actor.

As I mentioned above in the difficulty part, your opponents in story missions or show races almost everytime slow down at the end, enabling you the celebration of your victory. This is really noticeable in the show races. The races themself do have a nice layout and are nicely designed.

After all there are some quest lines that were very fun to play for me like the “Midnight Battle” races or “Drift Club Mexico”.

Conclusion

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