Developer: Vae Victis Games
Publisher: Vae Victis Games
Platform: PC
Tested on: PC
Racecraft – Preview
Racecraft is currently in development by the Italian Vae Victis game studio. Released in the beginning of March in Early Access on Steam, Racecraft promises to revolutionize the genre of racing games.
Racecraft is an ambitious game that promises to bring us some familiar racing games features, but also a few we haven’t seen before. For example, in the multiplayer mode, there will be different roles available that don’t involve driving the car. You can be a team manager, track engineer, mechanic or a car designer.
The biggest innovation Racecraft brings to the table is the Camilla engine, a procedural terrain generator that can produce an infinite number of realistic racing tracks. These can be saved and shared with other players. A true level editor will be available at a later date allowing you to customize these generated tracks even further.
Aside from customizable tracks, Racecraft also offers fully customizable cars, even going as far as allowing the player to create the car from scratch by crafting all the required parts. When the car is completed, you can tweak the setup to your liking.
Interestingly, there is a heavy emphasis on VR. Oculus support is said to come in one of the following patches with Vive support coming later. Vae Victis has developed a system called SixInput, which allows you to interact with the game UI without taking your hands off the wheel or joypad. Voice commands and a “virtual track engineer” will be patched in later too.
Although the game promises a lot of things, it isn’t that far into development yet. Not a lot can be tested in the current build. Tracks can be generated and driven on, but the game only supports racing against a single bot and no multiplayer is currently available. The latest patch introduces an “Event” mode where every week a track is generated and players race to get the quickest time around said track.
Making physical changes to the car and crafting parts isn’t currently implemented either. Alterations to a car’s set-up can be made, however this can only be done during a race session and the interface do so is atrocious. Thankfully, this does allow us to test the handling of the cars, which is of course the most important element of any racing game.
Fortunately, we have good news there. The racing feels solid and the car – there’s only one in the game for the moment – handles well. The developer seems to favor a more realistic approach. The racing feels like a mix between sim and arcade racing with an emphasis on the sim aspect. Similar to the way the open-wheel cars feel in Project CARS. When driven with the default setup, the car does understeer a little, but this can be remedied when you fiddle around with the setup options. Pity any changes you make can’t be saved in the current build.
It should also be mentioned that Vae Victis has only ever produced one other game, Victory: The Age of Racing. It was quickly abandoned by the developer after it received lukewarm reviews, in part because it underdelivered on features that were promised. These were never added to game and Vae Victis is trying to make amends by gifting Racecraft to every owner of Victory: The Age of Racing. We can only hope they deliver everything they promise this time around.
Conclusion
On paper, Racecraft is a racing game with a lot of potential and a bunch of cool innovations. It’ll be interesting to see whether Vae Victis can deliver on everything they promise, seeing that they’re a fairly small studio and have underdelivered in the past. Everything in the Early Access build of the game feels very promising, but there just isn’t a lot of content available at this time. If all the other features that are to be added to the game are of the same quality as what is in the game now, Racecraft has a bright future.
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