A recent trend in racing games is to take a franchise that has a certain identity, then change it. Dirt took a different direction with Dirt Showdown, Grid changed with Grid Autosport, Forza had Forza Horizon. This is one of those games.
It’s still fairly realistic, but is more forgiving and has an arcade presentation - it’s more colourful, especially in the menus. The graphical models are similar to the previous game - slightly tweaked in places, mainly a change in colour palette or lighting. Weather effects have been downgraded. Sound doesn’t seem as good either. Damage is also just cosmetic and doesn’t impact the performance of your car. Some features have been removed like tyre wear, fuel use and therefore - pits. Overall, it seems like a simplification and loses the pure sim racing speciality that the franchise was known for.
The Career mode is split into car classes, then these have groups of 4 events. In each event, there’s 3 challenges and you need to complete these to unlock other events. The thing is, it is rare that the challenge is to win, it might just be to “master x corners”, “draft then overtake”, “reach x mph”. It’s a very weird decision. The fourth event is unlocked by completing 6 challenges in the other 3 events which can be difficult to do.
You now purchase cars and can purchase upgrades. Money is achieved by levelling up rather than winning races. You can gain bonus XP for hitting the correct racing line when entering/exiting corners, and other aspects like hitting top speed, leading the race etc. Money is quite hard to come by, so you sometimes need to grind. XP can be earned outside of the career mode, so you can set-up single player races, or play the online events - one mode is just racing against target times, so you don’t race against human players in real time.
It's a linear progression system so you work your way through the tiers and can easily get stuck because of the restrictions. Previous games allowed you to jump into whichever tier you wanted. Also, the very first tier was Go-Karts but they do not feature here - and this is another aspect that makes it feel like it isn’t “Project Cars”.
You need to be really careful which cars you purchase. For example, you may just purchase a random car for the few events where the restriction might simply be “C class”, but then the next events might be “C class from Germany”. So if you bought an Italian car, then you will need to purchase a German car. Some events require a very specific car, so you need to read all upcoming events and choose the car that can race in the highest number of events. So there may well be loads of cars in the game, but you can’t really choose them because of the limited money.
If you do have spare cash, you can pay a fee to unlock races instead of meeting the challenge requirement.
There’s a few different event types; Short races. “Hot Lap” races, then there’s one where it is a time trial over 3 laps. This is difficult because hitting the wall or having a tyre leave the track invalidates your entire time. Not only that, but the target times are very challenging so you will have to gamble on a few corners and hit them at high speeds. In the other race modes, you are penalised by your engine cutting out and you temporarily become a ghost so that the opposition can drive through you.
I encountered frame-rate drops and my PC ran hot while playing. The loading times are excessive and it's frustrating that you are returned to the specific event menu when you have completed the race. So if you press A again, you will go through the lengthy loading screen to play the race again. So you have to remember you need to press B to go back one level to the main event selection.
There’s a few DLC packs that boost the career mode events quite significantly. I didn’t have these, but it could be the case that this allows you to gain more XP to earn more money which could help.
Project Cars 3 annoyed many fans of the series by changing the style but still insisting on using the brand name. Even if you approach it knowing that it’s not quite “Project Cars”, the race restrictions mean the game is constantly trying to push you away; you easily get stuck and have to grind. I did my best to persevere and get as far as I could, but there is only so much chance you are going to give it.