EXOcars Review: A Shining Example Of The Racing Genre

My favorite racing games have always been arcade-style titles with stylized physics that simulate the feeling of driving fast, rather than the reality of racing. Outrun 2 and Burnout Paradise are perfect examples that are more about driving stylishly, while more recent games like the Forza Horizon series simply provide you with a cool car and a beautiful road on which to drive it.

EXOcars isn’t like these games in its aesthetic or broad strokes, but it drives a sweet line between realism and fun like my favorite racers. It’s not a perfect game, yet the things that EXOcars gets right are so crucial to the racing experience that I’m happy to overlook its few flaws to enjoy its many thrills.

Get In Loser, We’re Going Racing

EXOcars puts you in the seat of (you’ll never guess) an exocar, a lightweight performance machine with a tubular exoskeleton frame, massive motor, and open wheels held on with extreme suspension components. In real life, exocars provide an unmatched power-to-weight ratio (in a four-wheel vehicle) that can rival super-car performance at a much lower cost.

Once you’re strapped in, the game delivers a driving experience designed for immersion. In VR, exocars are the perfect vehicles for experiencing high-speed fun. They’re low to the ground, fast as hell, and their trellis-style body allows incredible sight lines free of blind spots. I can hear the pebbles striking metal just under my feet, hear the slip and scream of rubber as it transitions from gravel to asphalt and back again, feel the vibration of the wheel and motor in our hands (with haptic feedback enabled). The only thing missing is the smell of burnt hydrocarbons and the wind in your face, though I guess you could always set up a box fan.

Controls are handled via either virtual/physical controls, wherein we place our actual hands on the game's in-game steering wheel and handbrake, articulating them via movements in the real world, or through traditional stick controls, where steering, accelerating, and braking are handled via thumb-sticks and buttons. Either control scheme works well, though there's a definite added challenge when using virtual controls.

Visually, the game is very nice. The cars look shiny where they need to, and suitably scuffed and abraded in all the right places. The environments are lovely, with artistic lighting and intelligent geometry to most effectively awe us mid-race with set-piece style vistas. The aesthetic sensibility lands somewhere between Monster Energy drinks’ marketing and the FIA World Rally Championships. EXOcars also enjoyably lets you customize the exocar with all sorts of ludicrous wheels, frames, and farings, often in the most garish of colors.

The sound design is spot on, mostly, with a few caveats. Everything sounds the way it should, including the random screaming eagles that call out as we crest the peak of the mountain course, and the gulls that squawk above the distant sea in the beach race. Unfortunately, the motors of these exocars just don’t sound very good. They’re monotonous, and the revs often fail to match my input. They’re predictable, and far less visceral than the rest of the game.

But the most egregious faux pas is the music. My favorite racing game soundtracks are the jazzy compositions of Richard Jacques in Metropolis Street Racer, or the legendary brightness of Kazumi Totaka's Wave Race 64 soundtrack. I understand that musical taste is subjective and not every racing game soundtrack can sound like Ridge Racer 4, but EXOcars’ music feels awfully like a less successful Avenged Sevenfold album. For me, “that's gonna be a no, dawg.”

Luckily, it's easy to shut off the in-game soundtrack, which I did after an hour.

Physics in the Lead

The exocars in EXOcars are specced for dual-sport driving; that is, racing on any surface; tarmac, public roadways, sand, snow, dirt, and anything in between. The environments in the game reflect this. You'll spin your wheels on mountain paths of crushed gravel, sandy beaches, island cliffs, urban streets, and parking garages. On each surface, these cars behave differently.

When driving over loose dirt, for example, I can feel the wheels slip and the car drifts far more easily than it does on the tarmac. On snow and ice, things are even wilder. The reason it works, though, is that these differences are predictable and logical. They make sense. Never does the car feel random and chaotic. If we spin out, it’s because we over-steered or did something foolish. If we suddenly find ourselves plunging off a cliff into the briny sea, it’s because we failed to read the road. And we really can read the road, to look for rocks and berms and variance in the terrain that can either help or hinder our race in ways that would hardly ever occur in a game only concerned with simulating a racetrack.

The physics engine is so good that you can load the suspension before a turn, hitting the brakes suddenly to give the front wheels added traction as we turn into an apex. You can whip the car just so right before hitting a jump, so that when you land, you’re already pointing in a certain direction. You can hook the leading wheel off the edge of the road when turning around a corner, using physics to effectively drag the vehicle around a corner without scrubbing too much speed. It feels amazing!

It's all brilliantly done. The clear sight lines, the open wheels, the articulating suspension hammering around corners mere feet from our eyeballs, the physics; sitting in an exocar in VR is just a visceral place to be.

Driving Modes

EXOcars’ main single-player mode is "Career Mode," a selection of challenging racecourses set in the previously mentioned varied environments. Upon choosing a race, you’re placed according to your skill level (times) in a certain position within the global leader-board rankings. The game then pulls three closely ranked rival players’ ghosts from the rankings and populates our race with these ghosts. So, in effect, you're playing single-player mode against similarly skilled online rivals, rather than computer-controlled AI rivals as in many racing games’ solo modes.

A couple of interesting notes on this mode; the ghost players’ exocars are rendered at a distance as solid, opaque models. When they get close, they turn translucent to not ruin our sight lines. It’s a small touch, but an intelligent one. As we improve in the game, the game populates the races with better ghosts, ensuring there’s always an exciting challenge. This adds dynamism to a game mode that might otherwise feel a bit low-stakes.

Active multiplayer modes allow us to join games against random players or create games with our friends. These real-time online races include proximity voice chat and the cars have collisions, because rubbin’ is racing, you know? There’s also a combat multiplayer mode in which players can scoop up items such as homing missiles and speed boosts, just like Mario Kart, and deploy these weapons of mass destruction to turn rival cars into scorched-out piles of ash.

The final option is the Tournament mode, in which players can compete to set the best times in a number of preset races. XOCUS says that these tournaments will appear over time and will offer players the opportunity to win “real prizes, such as cash rewards, accessories for your VR headset, and more.” Though I’m not sure how this will actually work, it’s something to look forward to.

Fender Benders

I mentioned in my opening paragraph that not everything is perfect. Here are some things that bother me about EXOcars.

Most of the courses are excellently designed and offer plenty of visual interest, though some are blander than others. These are often spiced up a bit when the time of day changes to night, or when weather effects are added, but a boring track is a boring track.

While the exocars are cosmetically customizable, the aesthetic options are somewhat limited. If you don’t like driving a dirt bike through a wall of flaming beer kegs, you may not find anything that looks particularly “cool,” if you know what I mean.

And while I’m not sure how this would impact balancing in multiplayer mode, the cars could use some performance customization. As it stands, there’s no way to tweak your suspension, engine, or performance stats. The team at XOCUS has laid out a roadmap that mentions (among many other things) that a tuning system is coming in December, but it’s not here yet.

EXOcars Review - Final Verdict

Where EXOcars really excels is in the same places that my favorite racing games have always excelled. It provides a visceral, arcade-y, physics-based experience full of the thrilling moments we’re all looking for when we step behind the virtual wheel of a race car. Like the best games in the genre, EXOcars makes you feel like a real-life race car driver.

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