DriveClub review: car culture

I love racing games, but I'm one of those odd ones who often prefers playing alone. It's fun to know that I'm beating my friends, but I usually want to jump into a race, zoom through and cross the finish line without having to get together a group of people or wait around in a lobby.

DriveClub's greatest contribution to the racing genre is how it manages to seamlessly blend the act of racing solo with asynchronous competition against your friends. That one major boon is aided by a solid (if unremarkable) core and some of the best visuals of this generation so far.

From the start, DriveClub is a relatively no-frills driving experience. There's a tour mode that lets you work through mostly racing-focused events building up to amateur, pro and legend trophy tournaments. You can jump into a single event across 50-some tracks that send you all around the world, from Canada to Scotland to India. And then a multiplayer mode allows you to register for scheduled competitive events, such as Italian and German sports cars facing off on a snowy Norwegian mountain.

All of these basics are easy to access through DriveClub's slick menu presentation. Once I got into the races, I quickly discovered that the game feels right in that kind-of-intangible way that good racing games pull off. The track design is solid and uses smart visual cues in the form of colored flags to help you prepare for sharp corners. DriveClub falls more on the arcade than simulation side of the genre, but it still manages to make each of its cars feel accurately different.

Some people are going to dislike how DriveClub forces you to wait for unlocks rather than allowing you to purchase vehicles at your discretion. For me, this design choice simply provided encouragement to keep moving through new events in tour mode, cycling back around to previous events with unlocked vehicles later on. It kept me trying different things instead of hitting my head against a single event that I couldn't improve on.

Your progression and unlocks will be aided greatly if you're part of a "driveclub," the titular draw of the game. When you join a driveclub with up to five other friends, all of your points earned will also be added into a second pool that increases your club's level. As a club levels up, all of its members gain access to special cars as well as unique logos and paint jobs. This allows for a sense of progress even when you're not playing; every time I turned on the game to discover my club had gained a level or two and opened up a new car, I felt more motivated to keep playing and contribute to that effort.

While the additional vehicles and visual flourishes are nice, clubs also expand the best part of the game: face-offs. Though racing is the core of the DriveClub experience, the game is always offering up other things to do on top of that.

As I blasted through one lap-based race in an arid, mountainous region in Chile, I came across a section of the track with multiple tight corners packed up one right after the other. An orange box floating above the track before the first turn indicated a cornering face-off. Once I passed the box, a line appeared on the track showing off the perfect line to take through these corners — the longer I stuck to that line, the more points I got.

Challenges can be focused on solo players or presented to whole clubs, but whatever form you prefer, they provide a great quick hit of entertainment. I often turned to them as a nice opener when I was first starting a session of DriveClub or as a great way to close out my evening with the game. Also, as with face-offs, challenges provide the competitive rush of multiplayer without actually having to deal with other people, which I greatly appreciated.