TOCA Race Driver 2006 Hands-On
We visit Codemasters in the UK and get our hands on the PS2 and Xbox versions of TOCA Race Driver 2006 for the first time.
Designer Jonathan Davis discusses what is undoubtedly Codemasters' most ambitious racer to date.
During a recent visit to Codemasters' UK headquarters we were able to get our hands on work-in-progress PlayStation 2 and Xbox versions of TOCA Race Driver 2006 for the first time. Currently scheduled for release in February 2006, TOCA Race Driver 2006 promises to improve upon its predecessor in just about every way imaginable, with greater realism and a greater variety of racing styles at the top of the development team's goal list.
When it was released in April last year, TOCA Race Driver 2--with its roster of 15 distinct racing disciplines--was undoubtedly Codemasters' most ambitious racing game to date. TOCA Race Driver 2006, then, is a mammoth undertaking by comparison, featuring no fewer than 35 different styles of racing spanning some 160 championships. The 35 racing styles in TOCA Race Driver 2006 will be organized into six "spokes"--touring, GT, classic, open-wheel, oval, and rally and off-road--and you'll be able to move up through the ranks in any one of them if you choose to play the game's pro career mode. If you opt to specialize in open-wheel racing, for example, you'll start out behind the wheel of a go-kart and will have to prove yourself in Formula 1000 (formerly Formula Jedi) and Formula Palmer championships (among others) before you're allowed anywhere near the cockpit of Williams' current F1 car, the BMW FW27. The FW27 won't be the only Williams F1 car that you get to drive in TOCA Race Driver 2006, incidentally, since Nelson Piquet's FW11B and Damon Hill's FW18 championship-winning rides will also be eligible for certain events.
TOCA Race Driver 2006 will feature more than 80 different cars in total, most of which are officially licensed race cars from competitions all over the world, such as the German DTM, the British GT, and the Australian V8 Supercars. Notable additions to the garage for 2006 will include Baja trucks, monster trucks, sprint cars, and Koenig-tuned Ferraris, Lamborghinis, and Porsches. The performance and characteristics of each vehicle will be determined by more than 400 variables, including around 100 (the same number used for each vehicle in TOCA Race Driver 2) that are used to accurately re-create the performance and durability of tires. To give you some idea of just how realistic Codemasters is aiming to make the tires in TOCA Race Driver 2006, some of the variables mentioned during our presentation included the rubber compound, the tread depth, the tire width, the size of the tire walls, the temperature, the weight of the car (which will change according to fuel consumption), and even the altitude of the circuit you're racing on.
Other individual car parts will be simulated with a similarly impressive level of detail, and in championships where it's appropriate you'll have the option to tune and upgrade your ride with new licensed parts. You'll also be able to affect your car's performance adversely, particularly if you're playing with all of the difficulty and car damage options cranked up. Race-ending crashes will be possible, engines will blow if you thrash them too much, and your vehicle's airflow characteristics will change with every dent you add to the bodywork. Purportedly, it'll even be possible for you to alter your car's aerodynamics so dramatically through collisions and such that its downforce is no longer adequate to keep it stuck firmly to the tarmac at high speeds, which could result in some particularly spectacular crashes if you're not careful.
TOCA Race Driver 2006 will boast a roster of no fewer than 45 tracks for you to wreck at, and since many of them offer multiple configurations, there will actually be more than 100 circuits in total. New locations in TOCA Race Driver 2006 will include tracks in Bahrain and Shanghai, and although many of the circuits from TOCA Race Driver 2 will reprise their roles in the upcoming game, we were disappointed to learn that our local circuit, the Infineon Raceway (formerly Sears Point), didn't make the cut for some reason. Regardless of where you're racing, you'll have to adhere to the same rules you would in real life, such as getting yellow-flagged for cutting corners. You'll also have to concern yourself with weather conditions, and although they won't dynamically change during a race, they will often vary between your practice, qualifying, and race sessions. One particularly interesting new feature in TOCA Race Driver 2006 will be the inclusion of class-based races such as those seen at Le Mans, where there are multiple races being staged on the same track simultaneously. The British GT Championship races, for example, feature a starting grid with cars from GT, N-GT, and GT Cup classes.
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- GameSpot Score 8.5 great
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TOCA Race Driver 3 Review
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