Racecraft - Early Access Impressions

Racecraft is an Early Access racing title from indie studio Vae Victis. As you can probably tell from the name, you have a number of features with which you can customise both your car and the track. The cars that you race are in the Formula One style, high-speed and low-built, but there are plans for the developers to eventually add more car types.

As of right now, this racer is pretty bare-bones, but this is sure to change in subsequent updates; there is a handy graphic displayed on loading screens, letting you know how close the developers are to completion. The version we played, version 0.3.1, had graphics at 50% complete, the engine at 75% complete, the modes at only 25% complete, and the physics at 80% complete. At least now we know.

The most unique aspect of Racecraft is the way the tracks are created. The game utilises a 'proprietary procedural engine' - nicknamed Camilla - and allows you to randomly generate as many tracks as you would like, with a number of pre-set options to help you get the type of course you'd like to race on. According to the devs, this system letting you generate an endless number of tracks has never been done in a serious racer before. It's similar to what we've seen in Trackmania, but while that game lets you create wild and wacky courses with jumps and flips, Racecraft creates tracks you'd think could be real. It generally works well; no matter how many we generated, they all seemed quite realistic, as if they had been hand-crafted.

The game currently has only two modes for the maps you generate: Hot Lap and Race. Hot Lap lets you try and beat your best time on a track, and you can race against a ghost if you so choose. Race does pretty much what it says on the tin; it's a race between you and an AI car. The latter only lets you play against one other car right now, and that car has the same properties as a ghost, allowing you to pass through it. Seeing as the game modes are the least complete portion of the offering, there's little doubt that we'll be seeing more, and what's there will be improved upon with more features. The multiplayer should come with standard racing and cooperative options, where each player will be a member of the pit team: driver, team manager, track engineer, mechanic, car designer and many others.

In the main menu, there are options for a 'career' mode and a 'my car' mode, which will presumably upon release let you customise your race car to your heart's content, something the store page touts that the final game will give you the option to do. Career mode is likely to be a single-player campaign of some sort that shows you the ropes and provides you with some kind of overarching structure. Added in the latest update, there are also weekly featured tracks, which are extremely welcome and add a little competitiveness to the game, letting you try and get the best time on the track and compare yourself to others around the world.

In terms of how the game actually plays, the cars handle as you might expect F1 cars to handle - tricky to turn at high speeds, more manoeuvrable when you take it slow. The driving mechanics and physics are easily the most solid aspect of the game, which isn't unexpected seeing as these are the features that are closest to completion (according to the aforementioned loading screen).

Graphically, the game looks good, even with half of the graphical options greyed out and inaccessible. The UI needs some significant work, as the menus can be quite tricky to navigate - particularly with a controller. On a related note, controller support was added in a recent update and allows you to control the car much easier for those who don't have a wheel. Racecraft will also eventually offer VR support, which should hopefully improve the experience of driving, and add an extra level of immersion to an already quite realistic game.

In its current state, Racecraft provides a bit of fun, and it's nice to see another good quality F1-type racing game with tight controls on the PC after the somewhat disappointing F1 2015. Unfortunately for Racecraft, the value isn't quite there yet - it costs £15 on Steam, and in our opinion, there isn't £15 worth of content in the game yet. What's more, the store page reads that they plan to up the price once more content has been released for the game. At some future point in time this could be justified, but right now, it might be for the best to hold off on picking this one up until there's more to get your teeth stuck into. Having said that, if you're into the idea of procedurally generated race tracks and you want to get on-board before the price goes up, there's enough promise in what's already available to make it worth the early investment, just know that you're not going to get much bang for your buck at this moment in time.