Rate The Sims: Community Edition | Automobilista

[Paul Jeffrey]

We are looking to crown the 'RaceDepartment Community Favourite' racing game - get your votes in now for our next game on the list... Automobilista!

Our dear RaceDepartment community. You folks are the most mighty fans of sim racing, often displaying an immense amount of understanding and depth of knowledge when it comes to our favourite hobby.

With sim racing and eSports in such a wonderful boom period of late. Gamers looking to have some fun with their virtual racing machines have never before had such a wide and robust variety of software to enjoy.

Now occasionally I've been in a position to rate new racing titles that have come my way, and almost every time I've received a wide variety of folks agreeing, or strongly disagreeing with my own opinions.

Opinions are great, but sometimes the opinion of one person, with their own likes and dislikes taken into account, can often give a bit of a skewed picture (intentional or not) to the greater cause in which said person is trying to explain.

As such, rather than doing one myself, and in the spirit of engaging some interesting community discussion, I thought it could be fun to let our own community rate each of the key sim racing / racing games available today.

As always with these things, please do try and respect each other and their opinions, and let's try to see if we can give a fun, but fair shake of the stick to each of the games included in this poll.

For transparency, I'm going to be featuring the following racing games over the next weeks:

• Assetto Corsa
• Assetto Corsa Competizione
• Automobilista (AMS)
• DiRT 2.0
• F1 2019
• GT Sport
• GRID
• iRacing
• NASCAR Heat 4
• PCARS 2
• RaceRoom Racing Experience
• rFactor 2
• WRC 8

I'm going to launch the article each Monday evening, and keep the poll running for a full week until the next new article is pushed live. So get your votes in quick!

Once I've completed the full list of games, I'll publish a final results feature, and we can award the winning developer the lofty title of 'RaceDepartment Community Favourite'!

Have fun, stay sensible and let the voting commence!

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[azaralamouri]

Physics feel perfect but no VR.

 

[Deleted member 197115]

Plenty of people play it, you just have to know where to look

Darknet not tracked by Steam perhaps.
https://steamcharts.com/app/431600

 

[AncalagonTotof]

Why isn't Kartkraft in the list ? I'm having great fun not understanding why my kart want to go right when I want to go left !

 

[ziogzzz]

I like this sim, everybody tells that it need better graphics, sorry but this is not the case not to like this sim! It is optimized very good and graphics are really ok, the main reason there is no online players, the cars are some unknown but they are really nice to drive, ffb great, i just did not get why it is not so popular, it just needed few details like new dashboard or better online expierence. Also AMS from the begining which i struggled to correctly adjust ffb even on fanatec v2.5 later i solved issues and to drive with mitsubishi was really great, but they also need to add some modern well known cars, better ui (a little bit better). From the first time i bought it and when i turn it on now it is really the difference in good way for me. Wish luck for AMS2!

 

[Insert Coin]

AMS rocks. You can play AMS in 'half VR' using VorpX (full 3D), see here, not bad at all.

 

[Koen Verlinde]

8

A well polished version of rFactor augmented to work with heavy modding. Not higher, as it basically was old from the start.

 

[melanieuk]

So many people are happy about the title, yet nobody plays it.
Paradox.

Yes that's true, it's just like Sim racing Youtubers praising rFactor 2, going all giddy when a new content is released for it, then they worm their way back to their favorite sim, never to play or broadcast rFactor 2 again, until the next content is released.

 

[CrimsonEminence]

It kinda reminds me of game reviews, where a game is considered a complete failure if it gets a lower score than 7/10 It's just silly - there's a scale, but you're not supposed to use more than half of it.

Rating inflation/valuation inflation..."5 for average" has become "5 for bad" in the general thinking of many, but this is mostly the fault of some reviewers (IGN for example *cough*) in the mainstream game journalism, that has become default.
For example with some AAA games because they won't make it look that bad because of some...uhm...endorsement...so let's give it a 7 instead. But this isn't exactly how it is meant to be...

 

[Sean]

I like AMS, gave it a 9.
Great feeling FFB, graphics may look a bit dated compared so some, but if you look closer it's not that bad at all. Game also runs high fps without working you PC hard either. Content is awesome and those additional free tracks from Patrick and his mob (thank you guys) add so much. Pity about not having VR, but AMS2 will have that.

 

[susuwatari]

IMHO, even Caterham experience in AMS alone deserves a 10/10.

 

[racingdud3]

Once was my favourite but i am more concerned on online racing with better grids and not having to organize nothing to get 8-12 cars on the race, only one day per week? Thats the problem with ams and rf2 , they are the best physics ffb out there but they lack on the multiplayer fun.

But it deserves my 8/10

 

[Robes]

I’m not going to rate it because that would be unfair. I like the sim but I simply don’t play it because of the lack of VR.

 

[Ernie]

For me it's a 9/10, because the driving feeling (physics and FFB) is the most intuitive and believable of all sims. Reiza did a damn great job with it.

The reason why i didn't gave a 10/10 is that i really really miss VR support in AMS. But there's hope. AMS2 is coming. And i'm quite sure Reiza will nail it.

 

[Turk]

I bought this sim but it took me a while to get the time to play it. I didn't realise it didn't have VR so I've never played it, and it had gone past the refund stage. Reiza is a company I don't mind supporting though. Eventually I'll probably get AMS2.

 

[mcoak]

If there was a perfect game, I would rate AMS 9.
As a perfect game does not exist, there is no way not to give 10.

 

[racingdud3]

As i said i rated it 8/10 but its a great sim, and my hopes goes to ams2 but they need to promote the sim so much better, add more attracting content and focus on organizing multiplayer races...if not its gonna be hard to get the success that Reiza and the next Automobilista title deserves cuz the competition is tight!

But i have nice memories and ams alonside rf2 is the best physics sim.
Some past great action i had:

1. BEST COMBO in my opinion, you should try it:

2. BEST AI experience i had with ams (another recommended combo):

 

[Jason Mullin]

I love titles like AMS where there isn’t endless tinkering with settings, I can just race.
Super sample X8 done.
FFB 180hz pure done.
Patrick track pack, EEC mod done and done.
Go Reiza!!

 

[CrimsonEminence]

FFB 180hz pure done.

You can set FFB pure to 360Hz...there is no issue with it, as long as you don't use an Athlon XP single core or something slower

(You can even set it to 720Hz via text file)

 

[Jason Mullin]

You can set FFB pure to 360Hz...there is no issue with it, as long as you don't use an Athlon XP single core or something slower

(You can even set it to 720Hz via text file)

I’ll give it a try. Just been running Fanatec recommended settings.

 

[CrimsonEminence]

I’ll give it a try. Just been running Fanatec recommended settings.

I'm using 360 pure with a G27 and it works fine, a Fanatec wheel shouldn't struggle with 360Hz refresh at all