💾 Archived View for appl.garden › play › world-racing-2.gmi captured on 2024-05-12 at 15:22:03. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2023-04-26)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
World Racing 2 was originally released in 2005 by a little-known company called Synetic. At the time it was received as a pretty mediocre racing game, but some people have praised its semi-realistic physics and modding capabilities, so it had a bit of a dedicated following. Hey, I like mediocre mid-2000s racing games, but why play this one in particular?
What's interesting about this particular game of its type is that it actually got re-released on Steam in 2022. If you know anything about racing games, you'll know that this is extremely rare. These games rely heavily on licensing deals with car brands, race track owners, and other companies - those licensing agreements expire, and so the vast majority of these games die and never come back. World Racing 2 actually got resurrected, using just one simple trick: they just renamed their cars using fake brand names, and changed some minor details in the car models. Voila, no more licensing issues. Absolute galaxy-brain stuff. Why can't EA do this for its classic Need for Speed games?
I have played many different racing games and on this blog I've talked a lot about why I enjoy them. TL;DR: to me, arcade racing games are the perfect genre for entering a "flow state" and relaxing, with just the right balance of excitement and repetition.
World Racing 2 has good car physics, which is obviously very important, and a decent variety of tracks and vehicles. Notably, all cars are European, but meh, I don't care about specific Japanese/US brands here since this game uses fake GTA-style brands anyway, and the offered European cars are genuinely varied: Le Mans cars, SUVs, old BMWs, Caterham roadsters, the Skoda Octavia, the Zonda - a good selection, especially for its time. The damage model is also fairly impressive - it's far from FlatOut, but it's one of the most impressive models I've seen in game designed with retail cars in mind. But other aspects of the game are disappointing.
The AI is absolutely relentless and it's seemingly impossible to catch up to them when playing with a keyboard. I ended up relying heavily on the fact that World Racing 2 is extremely forgiving about its penalty systems: it is aware that you're cutting corners and will tell you as much, but you only lose some potential bonus currency points, which has very little impact on the game - races can still be finished as normal. The game is still challenging even when cheating against AI as a lot of events have special conditions: some have limits on how much you can damage your car, sometimes your opponents drive much faster vehicles but give you a head start (until their rubberbanding kicks in), the off-road challenges have strict time limits which really test your knowledge of the world map as well as your understanding of the physics - the difficulty borders on unfair sometimes.
I would've given this game a 7/10 - it's difficult in part due to lack of polish, but with some cheating I managed to derive some fun from it, and overall there is a lot to like here. However, I'm deducting a point due to a serious bug which prevented me from unlocking further career events even after getting Gold in all previous races.
Some semblance of a bug report on the Steam discussion forums
The bug essentially resolved itself after I went back and re-did some previous events, though I had no way of knowing which ones were bugged or not, so I just blindly repeated previous events (some of which are, again, pretty challenging!) over and over until I could progress. So, uhh, in the end it's a *6/10* for me.
The 2022 Steam re-release might've gotten minor graphical upgrades from the original 2006 release, but it's enough for me to not be able to run it at maximum graphics levels on my laptop. So low graphics it is then. I have tested this game on both Windows and Linux and have found no issues with just standard Linux's Steam Play. Some Steam Deck users reported music not working, but they list some workarounds, and in my case, I did not need any workarounds as I had proper A/V plugins installed.
My entry for World Racing 2 - Champion Edition on ProtonDB
gardenapple - 2023-04-24
Game finished 2023-02-27