Recent reviews by Brian

Total waste of money. The 'simulation' is a lie by way of teleporting citizens and player failure prevention. Simply a city painter and nothing more.

Paid mods. That's all, really.

I love the game despite its flaws, but I cannot stomach paid mods.

This was an instant buy for me when I saw it being advertised before one of the Grand Prix's last year, and I have not been disappointed.

It's awesome to finally have a management game in a sport I enjoy watching and sim-ing, and Motorsport Manager certainly held me for a long time. In fact, with mods, it still does.

The environments are beautiful, the updated car models are chunkier and more substantial, so those livery changes finally show up as more than the simple two-tone designs we had at release. Playing the staff and driver market is fun, and working your way up the field is rewarding. For the casual gamer who enjoys motorsport, this game is an absolute must have. If you don't do racing, but enjoy management sims, you'll likely enjoy this too.

A couple of big negative points though, which I feel are more a me thing than a game issue:-
As a power gamer, I found after about 50 hours or so, everything got seriously easy. The AI are, unfortunately, too dim to challenge a player who knows what they are doing, and they struggle to keep up with your pace of car development whenever you hit a stat reset. The same goes for qualifying in a session that has a wet and dry period, where the AI don't look ahead in the weather reports, and then set their quali times in the dry on Inters.

The second thing is there are too many ways for a player to abuse a system for their gain - notably the Risk system on car develpment, which makes the game even easier (I didn't even use this method and still found a lack of difficulty).

However, with the game being so easy to mod for beginners (simple editing of databases), and the ability for more advanced users to modify the actual code of the game, difficulty and overhaul mods have been made which can keep even power gamers like myself challenged and engaged. A huge boon to modding is that mods can be grabbed both with or without Workshop, and can be mixed and matched as you see fit.

Without mods - I would only recommend this to casual gamers, regardless of whether you are a motorsport fan or not. If you play an hour here or there and want your progress to not be too slow, then it's a good title for you.

With mods - There is now something for everyone, and if you like your games challenging and you want to be in it for the long haul, you can opt for that experience while still enjoying the visually beautiful game that PlaySport have brought us.

If you asked me in December 2014, I couldn't recommend this enough, but as much as I love(d) this game, I cannot recommend it right now. Since the engine overhaul which released in around June last year, the game has had all the fun removed.

Bad driving physics, poor body deformation, God-awful health bar which had no reason for existing and absurd changes to the car cams have all contributed to this ill-feeling to what was a very promising game.

The developers don't listen to any feedback, make absurd changes like those I already mentioned, then don't work with the community to improve or remove features, they just truck on with whatever distorted vision they have. There is also a severe lack of direction right now, which also contributes to absurd changes.

Put simply - The build prior to the engine overhaul (build 6), we had player-run leaderboards, championships and events. Now, since build 7 onwards, we have had very little of that. Until Build 6 returns, this is a STAY AWAY.

Yet another fantastic game dragged down by exclusive content being hidden in crates. Microtransactions are the current cancer in gaming, but as usual people won't see it until it's too late and we have splash screens hidden in crates, with keys being £10 a go.