TOCA Race Driver 2: The Ultimate Racing Simulator Hands-On

Codemasters is currently hard at work applying the finishing touches to TOCA Race Driver 2, the sequel to Pro Race Driver, and we were recently invited to the company's UK headquarters to get hands-on with the game and to decide for ourselves if Codemasters' most ambitious motorsports title to date is living up to expectations. The good news is that the game boasts more than enough improvements over its predecessor to make it worth a look for any racing game fan; the bad news is that while the game is by no means easy, it does appear to have been dumbed down in certain areas.

The first-person cutscenes make the game much more absorbing.

When Pro Race Driver was released, it attracted as much attention for its innovative career mode--in which you assumed the role of a rookie driver named Ryan McKane--as it did for its excellent racing gameplay. McKane's story was well written and well presented through brief cutscenes and allowed you to race for different teams in championships all over the world. Your path through the game was determined largely by which of the team drive offers you accepted ahead of each season and by whether or not you then managed to meet that team's criteria for success. This time around the career mode is structured quite differently.

When you load TOCA Race Driver 2 for the first time, you'll quickly find yourself behind the wheel of a GT40 midway through the final lap of a race. This baptism by fire essentially serves as the game's training mode and allows you to familiarize yourself with the game's controls while your chief mechanic, Scotty, encourages you to experiment with the radio. At the end of the lap you're treated to the first of the game's well-presented first-person cutscenes, and then it's up to you to decide which of the two championships available to you at the start of your career you wish to compete in. These choices no longer come in the form of offers from teams, and you unfortunately have no say in which teams you drive for; rather, there are potential drives arranged for you by an attractive blonde agent who is eager to represent you.

Your objectives for any given championship in the game vary somewhat, just as they did in Pro Race Driver. In the early days you'll primarily be concerned with winning prize money so that your career can continue. Later in the game, though, you'll be competing for lucrative drives against rivals, so your objectives will involve making sure you look good and perform well next to them. As was the case in Pro Race Driver, all of the cutscenes in the game are brief so as not to interfere with your racing, and they definitely make the whole game more absorbing--particularly since you now play as yourself rather than as a character.

You need to defend your position from the car behind you while chasing the one in front.

Though TOCA Race Driver 2 features enough different events to qualify as a racing collection in itself, as opposed to merely an addition to your racing collection, the game's career mode does feel like a dumbed-down version of its predecessor's in some respects. For starters, you no longer get to do practice or qualifying laps ahead of races. How your position on the starting grid is determined in TOCA Race Driver 2 is anybody's guess--ours being that it's random or perhaps loosely based on your previous performances. This wouldn't be so bad if you were racing in similar vehicles all of the time, but given that you might have just finished a season of truck racing and are sitting in an open-wheel Formula Ford for the first time, it'll often take you a couple of attempts at the first race of a season just to get used to your new vehicle's characteristics.

In Pro Race Driver, not only did you have practice and qualifying options available to you, but many of the teams required you to do a test lap in their car before they'd let you race in it. There are also no options to customize the setups of the vehicles in the game, whereas Pro Race Driver gave you the option to tweak your car's handling and performance ahead of each race. With all that said, though, this game isn't a walk in the park by any means, and even those of you who have completed Pro Race Driver should find the game reasonably challenging.