RacePro Updated Hands-On

"The problem is when you have a lot of horsepower." So says SimBin Studio's creative director Diego Sartori, one of the driving forces behind the studio's upcoming racing debut on the Xbox 360, RacePro. Long known for its heralded PC sim-racing games, including GTR, GTR 2, and last year's Race 07, the studio is branching out with RacePro, a game that the studio hopes will please hardcore racing fans and perhaps create a few new racing fans along the way. We've had a chance to spend some time with an updated build of RacePro and, yesterday, we spoke with Sartori about the game's evolution on the Xbox 360.

So, back to that horsepower problem. As Sartori puts it, one of the benchmarks in developing a successful racing game is making the upper-echelon cars in the game both compelling and manageable. "We still want to have a game that can handle a lot of horsepower, but still have an intuitive [driving] experience. I definitely think once you open up the more powerful cars [in RacePro], the game begins to flex its muscles and shows how well we have managed."

You go about unlocking those upper-tier cars in the game's career mode, which appears to be the game's single-player highlight. It's organized in a very straightforward manner: You earn credits by placing high in races, and then use those credits to open test drives for teams in other classes. You start off in low-powered rides like Mini Coopers but, soon enough, you'll be piloting 400+-horsepowered brutes around the game's 13 circuits from all over the world. There are eight tiers that you'll need to conquer throughout your career, and though each tier will feature a mixture of car classes to choose from, the further you progress in the game, the hotter the rides (and the tougher the competition).

From a development standpoint, RacePro's mixture of approachability and demanding realism called for a brand-new game engine, codenamed "Lizard," to be built for the console. Although the game is still in development, and the preview build that we played had some rough edges (namely in the unstable frame rate), there are some important high points that improve on what SimBin fans have come to expect on the PC. Take track surfaces, for example. As Sartori put it, track deformations have been significantly improved in RacePro. You need only drive a single lap at a track like Brno--a constantly changing, engrossingly challenging track in the Czech Republic--for proof. When entering and exiting certain corners--turns that we've experienced many times in other console games--we were shocked by the amount of undulations threatening to upset the balance of our car. And the more powerful the ride, the more obvious each and every bump becomes.

As Sartori put it, that extra attention to track surface detail will play a big role in determining how you want to attack any course in the game. Now, of course, every track is different. Sartori describes Brno as a track in which every corner is connected--and a mistake on one turn will have ramifications on upcoming corners, if not the entire lap. Other courses in the game, such as Italy's Monza and Brazil's Curitiba, have a little more room for error yet are still, in their own ways, lots of fun to drive. To help you make the most of your laps, a color-coded racing-line feature can be turned on or off. Although the feature itself has become a racing staple over the years, we were interested in learning why the developers at SimBin went with a static racing line, as opposed to the dynamic line featured in Forza Motorsport 2. As Sartori put it, there's something to be said for a line that shows you the optimal line around a track, not just one that helps you get out of trouble if you make a mistake in braking or accelerating.

While the game's racing line is immovable, there will be lots of options for tuning your car. Like any racing game worth its salt, RacePro will go deep with the tweaking options; gear ratios, downforce, and brake bias are just a few of the aspects of your ride that you'll be able to change. Sartori told us that the development team has put a lot of effort into finding the correct default setups for all of the cars in the game. In fact, once the game's base physics system was in place, a large part of the testing came in the form of determining just how those default car setups should drive. As a result, the cars are currently set to understeer a bit, meaning that they're less twitchy and nervous in the corners, which presumably makes them easier to drive from the outset.

With a list of cars that range from Mini Coopers to open-wheeled F3000 cars, and a host of GT-class cars, race fans will likely find something to love in RacePro. We're particularly fond of the open-wheel Formula BMW rides; with front and rear wings that give you downforce in turns and enough horsepower to be fun, these rides seem to find the sweet spot between control and power in the early goings of the game. This is just a handful of the 44 unique car models found in the game, with plenty of different liveries to choose from.

Though RacePro will feature racing for up to 12 players online, there is an offline mode known as Hot Seat that looks like a good alternative for those who don't want to hop online. Here you can race competitively against a friend, or race cooperatively, with each player taking a turn driving the car. When racing cooperatively, you choose how many laps you want, the number of opponents and their skill and, most interestingly, the length of time that each player drives before switching out. You can choose between time (30 seconds, 60 seconds, 90 seconds, and so on) or number of laps. In a race, a prompt appears onscreen a few seconds before you switch over to the other controller. It's certainly no substitute for online competition against real foes, but it is an interesting twist on multiplayer racing.

RacePro will ultimately support online racing for up to 12 players, but the build that we played wasn't ready for online yet. However, we're hoping to hook up with the SimBin folks in a couple of weeks to check out that aspect of the game and hopefully learn some tips from the pros on how to improve our times on the various tracks. We'll be sharing those tips with you in our next look at RacePro in December.