Gentlemen, start your engines
When you begin the game, the first thing you’ll do is select your racing name – great, I have already created my own persona rather than have some go-getter, rebel-without-
a-cause forced upon me. A lovely little touch is that you can also select an audio name, which is the name that your team will actually call you. They will out-loud call you by this name, so choose wisely from the list of male and female names, along with nicknames. I went with Dumptruck.
After a short opening cinematic, instead of being dropped into a nice lobby where you can pick your first car, you’ll be thrown straight into the first race in a baptism that’s worth writing home about. No tutorial, no practice,
you’ll have to figure out the controls quickly and perfect them even quicker in this first race. This is actually a blessing in disguise, instead of fannying about with picking your first car – something that took me the best part of an hour with GT5 Prologue – you’re forced to focus on the racing. After all, that’s what this game is about and Codemasters definitely wants you to know that. This is such a dramatic beginning for a racer and it isn’t based on any gimmicks or some contrived tagged on story, it’s exciting on its own merits alone.
Another advantage of the first race is that you’re not worried with all the driving variables and vehicle tweaks, you could spend forever messing about with them without knowing what any of them do in a tangible in-race sense. The induction allows you to get a fe
el for the standard experience and then decide later whether the steering was too tight or whatever. The customizations to the experience have a decent amount of depth, but don’t worry, because they’re easily ignorable if you so prefer.
