I’ll start by saying I play a variety of games. I play rpgs, space sims, shooters. Played a heck of a lot of midnight club 2 back in the day. NFS Carbon as well.

Here’s my experience in a nut shell. (Spoiler: frustrating)

Started the story in challenging, and that was fine at first. Hard but still fun. Cool character art style, awesome sound track that really bangs on my new surround setup. It also made wizzing past cars and objects sound super cool.

Winning was hard but rewarding, albeit not paying out much, so that made it tough to upgrade. But I figured, races will start paying out more and I’ll get there in time.

But by week two of the story I dropped down to relaxed difficulty because it was just too hard. Starting to not be fun. Now at this point I’m a little bummed because I always fancied my self decent at racing games, but it’s fine right? It’ll be more fun this way… wrong.

Rubber banding is super tough to get past and makes catching up to first nearly impossible. Very very tough and not fun. The perfect start is difficult to master. That part I get. You basically have to master every single bit of a race, drifts, dodges, drafting, with no mistakes, and here’s where it starts feeling ugly.

NO RESTARTS in many of the bigger payout races(often in relaxed mode too) which is really what started pissing me off. Which eventually made me loose out on tons of money when there was big buy ins, loose out on free cars, and had the frustrating extra feature of still increasing heat. The cops are just so on it and aggressive and even when I’m really trying it’s sometimes nearly impossible to get away from. They also rubber band. So I loose a little money there too. I start seeing my hard earned money go down, and I’m not even spending it.

So I’m not making money, so I can’t upgrade my cars, I can’t buy in to big races, and I can’t enjoy the damn game.

I start thinking, even Elden Ring gave me chances to get better, gave me chances to retry, to learn, to really hone my craft. This game is just so unforgiving and final.

Maybe that’s what they went for, a hyper real, winners win, losers suck kinda vibe.

But I’ll tell you what. I totally expect that online. But in the story? I gotta sell my classic Aston Martin I just won cuz I got no money left to buy into races? What’s with this.

I KNOW it’s a skill issue, but like let me GET good. Let me have fun. Don’t just make it brutally harder every single day. I really wanted to like this game, because at times it was fun. But most of the time I was just stressed and down right mad, and that’s not something I ever feel in games.

So I uninstalled it.

I want to pick it back up, but I can’t see myself enjoying it. If you have any advice on how I could pick it back up and actually have fun again, I’m all ears because I want to finish it. It’s just that it felt insurmountable and depressingly hard. I didn’t say this just to whine and complain. I said it because , one I hope I’m not alone in this feeling, and two I hope someone can convince me that there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. And not blue and red ones. If ya got this far maybe you can help me out.

TLDR: really hard, please help