If someone with some sort of general knowledge of the racing world had claimed before the release on November 8, 2013 that the 20-person-strong indie studio Kunos Simulazioni's first racing simulator would dominate the entire genre, sell 14 million copies and 12 years later be bigger than ever, not a single living person would have believed it. That analysis would have been met with nothing but laughter, and it's fair to say that what Marco Massarutto & Co achieved in the form of Assetto Corsa is one of those truly astonishing gaming stories.
In September 2018, Kunos rolled out an official GT3 game based solely on the cars, teams, drivers and tracks of the international GTWC circuit. Assetto Corsa Competizione was never intended as an outright sequel but more as a spin-off, based on the Epic's Unreal Engine 5 and focusing on official licences and on esports. It took Kunos a little over three years to really get Competizione right, and after wrangling with the purchased game engine, they announced in 2022 that Assetto Corsa 2 would be a return to the studio's basics: a mix between street cars and race cars, lots of different types of motorsport and disciplines, and that everything would be based on a new, proprietary engine.
The years have flown by and the wait has been long. In the meantime, in the years that I have now counted down to the Early Access release of Assetto Corsa Evo, I have played Assetto Corsa and Assetto Corsa Competizione more than ever, and on a daily basis stated (over and over again) that they are the two single best sim-racing games released since Simbin's GTR 2 in 2004, which says a lot. Now Evo is here and despite initial server problems and a nasty bug that via a glitchy online portion made anything beyond time trial races impossible, the sim-racing world has now been able to spend the whole weekend in Kunos' sequel. Here are some quick impressions.
The most hyped part of Evo beforehand has undoubtedly been the open world aspect where Kunos recreated a significant part of Northern Germany where the player will be able to drive around freely on vast country roads, with no lap times or opponents, and in this early version of the game, this is not included. The open world part is not included and, according to the studio itself, will not appear until the summer. What is offered instead are five tracks (Laguna, Brands Hatch, Bathurst, Suzuka, and Imola) and 20 cars, four of which are regular racing cars. It's possible to run practice races without computer-controlled opposition and it's possible to run "Single Race" with AI cars.
One of the talking points ahead of Friday's release of Evo was whether Kunos had really strived for absolute realism, as in their two previous games, or whether there was now a risk of trying to let a Gran Turismo-like accessibility meet the ruthless realism that the predecessors are based on. You can throw that worry out the window, right now. Evo is a simulator, pure and simple, and the new tyre physics have clearly borrowed elements from the first game as well as from Competizione. Even on my first lap around Brands Hatch, I find myself grinning, because this is familiar but also fresh and different, all at the same time.
When it comes to the improvements in tyre physics and the game's force feedback, it quickly becomes clear that Kunos has done a lot of work on the centre of gravity of the car and an even more clear and detailed emulation of how it feels when cornering, braking and accelerating. I feel exactly where I have my Mercedes AMG GTR GT3 more than ever, before I even started to fiddle much with steering wheel settings, and before any of Gamereactor's dual motion systems even work with the game (the telemetry has not yet been shared with various manufacturers). To call the car physics and FFB absolutely amazing, even now, is no exaggeration. It is a fair assessment of what, when finalised (this summer), will outshine everything in sim-racing heaven.
Kunos has managed to create a Force Feedback system that seems to be able to communicate to me as a driver exactly what is happening in the tyres, plus the chassis, without having to kick out the amount of force out of the steering wheel base as extremely as is often the case in many other competing titles. If there wasn't a lot of valuable detail in how the steering wheel feels here, it might be possible to call the FFB "weak" but that's not possible, as it is. It is rather more real than in both Assetto Corsa and Assetto Corsa Competizione. You can feel everything that's happening under and in the car without having to squeeze the steering wheel before each corner, and this is more reminiscent of Automobilista 2 than anything else, if you ask me.
The feel of the car is also somewhat reminiscent of Automobilista 2 in how you, as the driver, can control the car more with your brake pedal than in previous Assetto titles and that the car tends to rotate a little (chassis flex is emulated this time too, for the first time in Kunos' development history) if you step on the gas when the front tyres are not in line with the front of the car. This doesn't happen in Competizione, for example, and has been an aspect criticised in Automobilista 2 that I always liked. To me it has always felt like the car has real weight, real momentum, and like there is rubber underneath it that is expanding and stretching. This being realistic and well executed is also testified by GTWC pros James Baldwin and David Perel, who call the Evo physics "fantastically realistic" while describing it as addictive.
As for the graphics, it's hard not to be impressed, too. A tiny Italian team has thrown out Unreal Engine, built its own rendering technology and, even at the alpha stage, created a racing game that's stunning. Beyond the Gran Turismo 6-like presentation (which is truly gorgeous and suits the game perfectly), it's great to see the incredibly high level of detail in the new car models. Once out on the track, it's obvious that Evo hasn't been optimised properly, as it's far from finished, and even with an AMD 7900 XTX, it's hard to get a particularly seamlessly smooth refresh rate as it stands. The texture memory also struggles on a regular basis and sometimes the game goes completely black and then requires me to go into the settings and disable "Fullscreen" and then enable it again.
The best looking part of the whole game at this stage in my opinion is clearly the way Kunos has utilised volumetric lighting to add a little haze to the air that every racing simulator minus Dirt Rally 2.0 sadly lacks, and I've been asking for this for years. It builds a lot of realism and it also creates a great atmosphere and depth that is hard to replace. The weather effects here are also impressive and I'm looking forward immensely to how gorgeous everything will be once it's all finished. The same goes for the sound, which is already a highlight. Kunos has had the extremely good taste to add 200% more reverb to the engine and exhaust sounds inside the car, which is a brilliant choice. There is more banging under the car, more "clunk" in the brakes and more whine out of the gearboxes, which I have also requested for years, and now finally is included.
Assetto Corsa Evo should perhaps not have been rolled out in this state, if I am to be a bit merciless in my final sentence here. It would have been more impressive to push out a completely finished product this summer based on the extremely promising foundation that has been cemented here. At the same time, as with many Early Access projects, it's cool to have the opportunity to follow along from the beginning and then see how the game from alpha to gold status grows, expands, updates, and is upgraded and polished to the gem that this will most likely become, because there is an incredible amount of potential here.