Assetto Corsa Review

Assetto Corsa is two products in one box and they are wildly unequal. The simulation is extraordinary. Kunos laser scanned its circuits, built a tyre model that tells you through the wheel exactly how much grip is left, and produced force feedback detailed enough that people learned real circuits on it before driving them. A decade on, it is still the reference other sims get measured against, and the Nordschleife in a road car remains one of the great experiences in the medium.

Everything wrapped around that is threadbare. The interface is a hostile grid of tiny panels, the single player career is a list of events with no character, and the opponent AI has never learned to race side by side without eventually committing to a move that ends in a wall. What saved it is the modding community, which delivered cars, circuits, a replacement launcher and a shader patch that rebuilt the lighting and the weather entirely. Buy it for the driving and accept that half the software you end up running was written by somebody else.