One sim to rule them all: we go hands-on with Assetto Corsa Evo (2024)

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20 years ago in the northern Rome hills that surround the Vallelunga circuit, a group of software engineers who’d been working in simulator development for automotive and motorsport applications had an idea: perhaps the kind of ultra-high fidelity, physics-driven simulator they specialised in might work as a game.

Two decades later, the Kunos Simulazioni developers walk the halls of Dortmund’s ADAC sim racing expo with endless patience as they’re near-constantly stopped by fans and asked for photos, dealt enthusiastic handshakes, and pressed for details on their upcoming release, Assetto Corsa Evo. It’s like watching Stan Lee turn up at Comic Con.

It was a good idea that studio founder Marco Massarutto and his team had, then. Since Kunos’ inception, the studio and sim racing have both found new levels of popularity, legitimacy, and nigh-religious fandom. The lockdowns helped, of course – it’s a staunchly indoor activity – but central to the sim racing boom, really, is the skyrocketing standard of both software and hardware.

2014’s Assetto Corsa set an early high tide mark for the genre. 2019’s Assetto Corsa Competizione did it again, this time with some official licences for several motorsport categories, GT World Challenge Europe and the Spa 24h. To many it’s still the modern gold standard of sim racing, and an enduring esports hub.

But, sensing a lull among its contemporaries, the likes of iRacing, Forza Motorsport and Le Mans Ultimate, Kunos decided to press its advantage. A new game, running on a new proprietary engine, and a new approach to structuring all the content within it. There’s a reason it’s called Evo – in sim racing, it’s adapt or die.

So, how does it drive?

There’s a comforting feeling of familiarity as we slip behind the wheel of a Porsche 911 GT3 Cup at Imola in the first of three scenarios we sample during our hands-on session. It’s a car and track combination any Assetto Corsa Competizione player will be at home with, and that serves to underline the fact that Evo looks and feels much closer to ACC than the original AC. And yet, the signs of progress are everywhere.

We first feel it opening the steering wheel on the exit of Tosa corner, that tricky second gear not-quite-hairpin that always feels like you could have carried more speed through it. As we move through the gears, we can feel the tyres complaining with newfound fidelity. It’s a constant throughout our time with the game - there’s so much detail to the handling model, but particularly at low speeds there’s incredible fidelity to the sensation.

Where does it feel the most Evo-lved?

We need to talk about braking. It’s terrifying. There’s something about the particulars of weight transfer to the front, the twitchiness if you shift laterally under braking, that makes you purse your lips heading towards every apex. It was a subtle art in ACC, where the great drivers discerned themselves from the merely good. Here it feels even more responsive to the particulars of your brake pressure, and exactly how greedy you are about trail-braking during the turn-in phase.

On a related note, the sound design when you send it into the gravel trap is really top-notch stuff.

Can it do hatchbacks though?

This meaty, responsive and convincing simulation holds up just as well as we take an Alpine A110 around Mount Panorama’s dramatic ups and downs, and – our personal highlight – around Brands Hatch in a Hyundai i30N. Particular care has been lavished on the playful nature of modern front wheel drive vehicles in Evo, and there’s no better place to feel that in your hands than in those Kentish corners, inviting ever-more speedlike sirens flanked by sand traps.

The track detail is typically brilliant, of course, just as it was in ACC. But the curveball during our playtime is the ever-changing track condition, a demonstration of Evo’s dynamic weather effects. It’s one of the reasons this release has jumped to a proprietary engine from Unreal Engine 4, along with performance considerations for triple-screen setups and VR, and it does standing water like no other sim.

It’s good at the wet stuff, then?

Oh yes. You can see the rain flowing down Mount Panorama’s famous slopes. As the rainfall intensifies, you notice it gathering in the places those LIDAR-scanned tracks say it should gather. Lap by lap, subtly, but noticeably.

And all that water’s displaced in real-time, too. Dry lines appear based on which part of the track surface vehicles are actually passing over, which means if you drive a deliberately contrarian path through Brands Hatch, within a few laps that ‘wrong’ line will be the dry line, and potentially even quicker than going the traditional racing line across the wet patches and standing water. Which, unlike Project CARS 2, isn’t a synonym for ‘armco barrier-magnet’ in Evo. You feel the aquaplaning, but if you correct the snap in time, you can get away with a trip through a puddle.

Does it look prettier than Unreal Engine 4?

Well before we don our wig and reach for the gavel, we should keep in mind that the build we played is still pre-alpha. There’s a lot of dev time between now and the game’s Early Access launch next year.

All that said, there’s an impressive sharpness to cars and trackside elements that feels new. Like getting a new set of spectacles and realising you’d been squinting at everything before. The lighting has a different atmosphere to UE, but we need to drive many more laps before drawing any conclusions.

And we will. ACC’s handling was the best in the business before Evo’s advent, but now all we can think about is our next chance to master that new braking sensation, and attune to all those details we’re getting through the wheel. This one could be a bit special.