VRC PRO – Review
Follow Genre: Racing
Developer: Virtual Racing Industries Ltd.
Publisher: Virtual Racing Industries Ltd.
Platforms: PC
Tested on: PC

VRC PRO – Review

Site Score
5.5
Good: A lot of content, Many tracks and vehicles, Realistic.
Bad: Long loading times, No real single player.
User Score
5.3
(9 votes)
Click to vote
VN:F [1.9.22_1171]
Rating: 5.3/10 (9 votes cast)

Driving RC cars is a pastime that was a favorite father-and-son activity. With the dad teaching the young kid how to drive around in his little remote-controlled car, this was a hobby that sometimes got forgotten when growing up. Luckily, there are still many people practicing this hobby. However, the hobby can get quite expensive and not everyone lives in an ideal area to drive RC cars. This game might be a viable option to tinker on RC cars, when the weather or location does not permit it. While we weren’t completely impressed by this title, it had some merits that practitioners of the hobby could certainly appreciate.

Story

VRC PRO is a simulation of your character going to a RC event. In real life, you will interact with other people talking about the cars and setups, but in this game your story is just about you behind your workbench. Hence, this game is pick-up and play, which is a good thing since you are free to do whatever you want.

Graphics

The graphics aren’t the strong suit of the game, but they aren’t that bad either. Although the game looks rather simple in general, many things are done right. To start with, you have a few interesting camera angles, from looking at your vehicle from the paddock, watching it on TV to actually flying behind it like in a normal racing game. It would have gotten an extra point for realism if there was a camera mounted on top of the car, so you could view the race from there (like some do in real life). There are a lot of tracks with different sceneries and a wide range of vehicles to play with. These all have some alternating appearances, but within certain classes, you basically don’t really have a difference. There is also an option to customize vehicles. However, it is very simplistic and doesn’t add real value to the game. Even with the graphics turned all the way up, you notice that the game will look decent and in favor of being fluently the developer just did not use high resource-demanding visuals.

Sound

This is the worst part of the game without a doubt. The sounds used are beyond awful and some will even make your ears bleed. However, we start on a positive note, the overall noises of the cars are decent, with the electric RC cars sounding pretty ok. This contrasts with their nitro counterparts. In reality, miniature fuel engines have a high-pitched noise, but nitro engines have more depth to them, so they sound quite intimidating, making you that cool guy driving them. In VRC PRO, the sounds are so high-pitched without decent bass added to the exhaust that driving around with these nitro carts is even a bigger torture than having to listen to terrible music. Talking about music, there is none, there’s absolute silence on the tracks. There is a commentator that talks about laps and lap times, but he is just a simple robotic voice that takes you back to the Windows XP text-to-speech program.

Gameplay

VRC PRO is a RC racing game that tries its best to be a simulator for this sport. In its core, the gameplay is very good and you have tons of customization options to choose from. You can start with building your RC car from the ground up or selecting a pre-made template and improving upon the formula. Thereafter, you can adjust many settings from suspension to gearing, damping, aerodynamics and many more. Because there is a great selection of different vehicle types, each player will find a toy to his or her liking. Whether you prefer off-road buggies, fast nitro racers or even drift cars, you will have fun playing this game.

Overall, there aren’t too many modes to choose from, you have a practice mode and an online multiplayer mode. The practice mode is to try out any track with the allowed vehicles (you can’t drive that drift car in the mud for example), to hone your skills and to optimize the settings. A true downer for the practice mode is the excruciatingly long loading time as it takes ages to start a game. Whereas you just drop into multiplayer like it’s nothing, single-player is very slow, which is frustrating. This being said, you will spend a lot of time building and tuning your RC collection. However, there isn’t anything to unlock. This is not really a deal breaker, but consequently, there is no sense of progression in this game.

Controlling the game can be done by either keyboard or an actual RC controller. The developers sell a USB dongle that you can connect your real life remote with and play the game like this. We don’t know what this is like since we could not test this feature. Gameplay feels decent and the vehicles handle very realistically.

Conclusion

VRC PRO tried its best to be a good simulation game, while the gameplay isn’t half bad with good physics and a lot of content, it’s mainly the sound that is lagging behind. The graphics are more simplistic and could use some touching up. For someone that really likes the hobby will find that the building and tuning of the cars has been done nicely but others that are curious about this title will be held a bit back because of its steep price tag.

VN:F [1.9.22_1171]
Rating: 5.3/10 (9 votes cast)
VN:F [1.9.22_1171]
Rating: 0 (from 0 votes)
VRC PRO - Review, 5.3 out of 10 based on 9 ratings
MC_JP


Never give up on a dream. It might be a long nightmare, but one day it will change into a beautiful reality - MC_JP 2014

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