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I recommend this game but I don't.

I'm sure it's a fun game -- once you make enough money to stop playing the missions. The CPU's set line in the game are a complete and utter disturbance to the gameplay. Each time a CPU in a race makes contact with the racer, it's like getting hit with a truck; when the racer tries to hit the CPU, it's like it got hit with a pillow. Even if somehow the CPU gets knocked around more than usual, it will have no problem going back to the same line it was following all along. Overall a decent but annoying game, the CPU's need to be fixed -- especially when most of the negative reviews are surrounding that area in particular. If the grind was against CPU with at least matching physics to my own maybe I'd enjoy it more, but for now I'm forced to memorize the same line the CPU takes to avoid being hit by what seems like a freight train. Every. Single. Time.

I'll keep playing because it's too late for a refund, I just really hope it's worth it in the end. It's a cool concept, but I just pray they give the CPU's a 'conscience.'

I'm writing this review from the perspective of someone who has never played CarX Drift Racing Online since I'm not a fan of drifting enough to buy a game about it.

CarX Street is an alright game, deserving of its mixed review score at time of writing. I definitely feel hints of the legendary street racing games of old such as Need for Speed: Underground 2 however right from the get-go I got the impression that CarX Street isn't really for me and I'm better off just sticking to the classics.

Much like CarX Drift, Street leans heavily into its online functionality but I don't feel like it's very necessary. The game reminds me a bit of The Crew in this regard (although to a lesser extent) where there's a perfectly adequate and quite large singleplayer experience to be had which is undermined by how much the game is trying to be an MMO. I realised CarX Street is online only when I tried to launch the game offline since there's no option to disable ghosted online players who appear in the open world. After 30 hours I stopped playing the game because, among other issues I have, the singleplayer material got quite repetitive although I barely felt like I had scratched the surface of everything the game has to offer. If you manage to exhaust the singleplayer content and are interested in the online experience as well, you could end up spending hundreds of hours playing CarX Street.

I bought the rather misleading "Deluxe Edition" bundle because it was only 21p more expensive than the base game alone in the winter sale. The Deluxe Edition is actually just the base game plus the Deluxe Cars DLC which allows you to acquire a number of fast cars for free right from the beginning of the game including a Lamborghini Aventador. The bundle also gives you 100,000 credits. Strangely, obtaining a few of these deluxe cars are gated behind reaching certain XP levels which seems completely arbitrary considering the genuine supercars in this pack are available from the get-go. If you're just playing CarX Street for the online side of things or don't care for progression then this Deluxe Edition bundle would probably be a great boon as it stops you having to slog through the game with slow beginner cars. Since the singleplayer experience is all I care about, I tried everything I could to restart my game from scratch (short of requesting a refund and re-purchasing the game). No amount of looking it up, deleting files and disabling steam cloud allowed me to start over though since CarX Street is trying so hard to be an online game I imagine your save is stored on the devs' server. Annoyingly, it seems like resetting your progress used to be an option in the profile menu in-game but was removed in an update.

CarX Street uses generative AI in place of voice acting and character art which isn't a significant aspect of the game but unacceptable nonetheless. I'd rather the developers compromise or not include stuff at all instead of resorting to using AI because they're too miserly to hire real artists. Tokyo Xtreme Racer has gotten a lot of mileage out of using simple silhouettes instead of fully-rendered character illustrations and everybody is fine with it. I wouldn't have bought CarX Street had I known about the use of AI beforehand and it weighs on my conscience that I'm giving this game a positive review despite it.

I think CarX Street's map is amazing at this price point and feels more like a believable city than other racing games. The abundance of car parks, the numerous apartments and garages available to buy and the gas stations dotted around everywhere (since fuel is an in-game factor) help to make the world feel like a real place. When it comes to realistic-feeling cities which are still conducive to good street racing gameplay, I think Midnight Club: Los Angeles' map is the gold standard and I find CarX Street's downtown evocative of that. I was overall very impressed by the scope of this game's map so it boggles the mind that I've seen reviews calling it too small, I can't imagine what standards these people must have.

I'm not crazy about the physics in CarX Street although I don't think the handling model is a lost cause. Cars tend to excessively understeer until you're able to tune it out by upgrading various parts of the car and adjusting a lot of settings. I understand how this alienates people, especially new players who don't have access to higher tier upgrades which allow for a wider range of tuning. By default cars feel like they're made to be drifted but it is possible to build for grip although by doing this most of the time I felt like I was walking a tightrope between drifting or understeering around every corner. I feel like you have to put in way too much work tweaking advanced settings and reading guides to make a car which feels half-decent to drive and this is one of the big reasons I stopped playing the game - it gets so tiresome. Because of this I think it'd be beneficial to be able to adjust tuning from the menus in free roam like in Forza Horizon. Right now I need to pay a nominal amount to fast travel to a tuning shop every time I need to tweak a slider to try and prevent my car from understeering so much. I'm not sure how many casual racing and drifting fans have the patience to abide all this inconvenience so I'm not surprised people conclude CarX Street doesn't have very good physics.

The car list isn't enormous like we've come to expect from modern racing games but this is made up for by incredibly thorough customisation presumably owing to the fact that cars are unlicensed facsimiles of real world models. I feel as if there's something for everyone even if your favourite types of cars are fairly niche. Any engine can be swapped into any car which can lead to some outlandish builds but also strategic downgrading.

Singleplayer races in CarX Street have a maximum of 3 opponents which I found a bit dated. It makes sense when you're racing on the tight mountain passes but races on the wide-open city roads and highways feel a bit empty with only 4 people. On the hardest difficulty the races were a good enough challenge although I felt the difficulty came typically from wrestling with the physics. Challenging the game's various clubs and doing their series of races reminded me a bit of the car clubs in Midnight Club 3. Finding car parts in the open world feels a lot like Test Drive Unlimited 2 (and the other games which have lifted this mechanic); there's a sense of accomplishment in finding all of the parts and getting to keep the car.

I'd like to be able to turn off the Forza Horizon-esque skills HUD item at the top-centre of the screen and ideally replace it with a rearview mirror. That'd be a much better use of the space, especially in races. I'd also like to be able to toggle off certain camera views since there are so many to cycle through - personally I only need hood camera and ONE chase camera.

In conclusion my impression of CarX Street is that this is a really good game which is marred by plenty of "modern gaming crap" which prevents me from being too enthusiastic about it. Since I didn't play CarX Drift I'm pretty late to check out anything by these devs but from what I've read and seen myself since buying their game they appear to be the kind to make some pretty boneheaded decisions. For example, in the time between me picking up CarX Street and writing this review an NFS-style timesavers pack has been made available for £6.99 (funnily enough more than what I paid for the game in the first place) which reeks of pay-to-win since the game leans into its online gameplay so much. However, I can't ignore how incredibly cheap CarX Street is considering all this game has to offer and this is the main reason I can just about justify giving a positive review. This is the kind of game a AAA studio would hold out their hand and expect you to put down £50+ for.

should've read the page more in depth. uses ai for certain bits, and it is VERY noticeable from the start (i thought it was just bad voice actors for the first minute or two)

The Ai in this game is some of the worst I've ever played with in any racing game. They always have physics priority, pick the worst racing line, and because of the way the game is structured it almost always forces you to reset the entire race. Increasing the difficulty seems to only increase the literal average speed an AI can drive, while still being just as stupid. This leads to more frequent and frankly frustrating accidents, sometimes happening within the first ten seconds of a race, REPEATEDLY. Playing with a Wheel is inconvenient, the buttons don't work on the menus and my controls started inverted. I turned the traffic from "regular", to "low", and then "off". Literally not a single thing changed, even after restarting the game. Traffic spawns are sometimes poorly veiled. I practically watched a car spawn in my way during a race while I was going through an intersection. Upgrading a car feels very spotty, overly complicated, and convoluted. You can easily spend 150000 credits on a car and the only difference you'll notice is the tier has gone up so you can't use it in anymore of the races you were just doing. The "r" upgrades for the body and handling of the car feel great, just the powertrain upgrades feel terrible.
This game handles pretty well, it looks good and sounds good. I'm sure when using the game to its full potential with car customization, online multiplayer, and in depth livery designing it is extremely enjoyable. Getting there through the story and AI races is absolutely not at the moment.