It's been a long road to get here, but CarX Street has finally dropped on PC. The follow-up to the highly popular CarX Drift Racing Online arrived with little fanfare on Steam after months of delays.
Coming in at just £14.99, this title offers open-world racing at a fraction of the usual AAA title costs. Can it give players enough bang for their buck though? Here's our CarX Street Review.
Reviewed on PC, publisher did not provide review copy.
A shaky start
CarX Street doesn't have the big budget of a Forza Horizon or Need for Speed, but it is targeting the same player group with its open world map and sleek aesthetic.
Unfortunately, it has a pretty janky introduction for players to sit through. You arrive in Sunset City and get the low-down from a horrible AI voiceover of a couple of characters that will play bigger parts later down the line.
This is easily the worst part of the game. The awful cadence of the AI voice is totally immersion breaking and immediately makes you disinterested in any sense of story in CarX Street.
Fortunately, you get into a car pretty quickly and can say goodbye to these AI terrors, but they will show up later and I'm sure are around as you progress deep into the story too.
Need for CarX Street
Once you jump out of your 911 introduction car and pick your starter car, you can go for a drive. Instantly, CarX Street gives off Need for Speed vibes. The City feels familiar to NFS Heat's Palm City with its broad ocean and sprawling city. Even the soundtrack feels familiar if you have played recent NFS titles. Thankfully, the cringier elements of modern NFS have not been transplanted into CarX Street.
While the city feels very NFS, the countryside portions of this map do not, as they offer mountainous switchback roads that are more like Fast and Furious: Tokyo Drift. The intention here is to burn through some tyres and kick up some smoke in classic CarX fashion.
That they haven't gone away from their drift audience with CarX Street is very welcome.
Right down the middle
While you can fire up a wheel and start drifting your way through the map, CarX Street is also a solid controller cruiser.
If, like me, you aren't much of a drifter, this game can be enjoyed simply as an arcade open-world racing game. The AI opponents aren't much to write home about, but you can race, earn credits, and buy cars to fill out your garage in a fun way.
While the world feels very NFS, the handling does not. It's not nearly as arcadey, and rewards precision control without overly punishing recklessness. You can leave the controls on automatic and keep your accelerator firmly planted for the most part, but feathering the throttle out of corners, timing downshifts, and sending even the cheapest cars into a slide is a delight.
On wheel the force feedback is consistent and feels very natural. It's nothing special, but you can feel everything you need to dance the car on the edge of grip.
Verdict
For £14.99 CarX Street is great value. It's got a huge array of vehicle customisation options, tuning, and a big open world to explore. Even if you don't touch a race or the story, that is worth the price of purchase.
While unlicensed, the car list is strong and the models are very good. And yes the AI voiceovers are truly awful, but if you turn them down in your audio settings you won't notice them again.
Visually, CarX Street doesn't reach the highest of AAA open world racers, but it isn't far off. The only true jank comes when you get up high in the mountains and try to look out over the city. Otherwise, as you are driving through the streets everything looks good. The lighting, and in particular the day/night cycle, is really strong.
The game will get a lot of ongoing support from its developers, and should evolve over time so if you are still hesitant that is understandable. But if you are looking for a new game to just grind some car collection, do a little tuning and just cruise around on, you'll do a lot worse than CarX Street.
