NASCAR Heat Evolution First Impressions: Boy, this game is not good at all

If you’re a NASCAR fan, it’s been impossible to avoid the Tuesday release of NASCAR Heat Evolution. Commercials for the video game have been omnipresent during NASCAR programming and the sanctioning body’s official Twitter account has even taken up the cause to encourage people to buy it.

The hype created around the Dusenberry-Martin product is a good thing. NASCAR fans have needed a quality racing game. While gamers disagree on what the last great NASCAR game was, the consensus is that the last quality game came a long time ago.

And, unfortunately, it remains a long time since there was a good NASCAR racing game. Hell, the coordination of promotion surrounding NASCAR Heat: Evolution may be the only good thing about this game.

I’ll be blunt; I wasn’t expecting greatness from this game. Given the awfulness of recent NASCAR games, my expectations were low and my optimism was high. Through my first few hours playing the game my expectations haven’t even come close to being met and that optimism certainly looks unfounded. Here’s why:

• Before you even get to the gameplay, it’s pretty obvious this title was rushed and/or lacked a lot of detail work. But first, a major complaint. You cannot simply pick the game up at race at any Sprint Cup Series track you want.

When you first fire up the game you can race at Atlanta, Charlotte, Daytona, Dover, Kansas and Texas. That’s it. That’s the list. You must spend considerable time playing the game and accumulating points to unlock more tracks in solo mode. I’m 31; I’ve never played a NASCAR game that didn’t allow you to pick whatever track you wanted from the start.

It’s insipid. And a huge turnoff.

This review will focus on non-online modes within the game. Online gamers have the ability to race other users at any track on the circuit.

• The menu and options are very scarce. There aren’t many details to toggle on and off and you better check the controller settings before you turn a lap. There’s no ability within a race or practice to change any options about the game. Seriously. The pause menu offers just three options: return to the game, retire or restart. That’s the list.

But there’s not much you can change anyway. There aren’t any graphics options and very little you can do when it comes to assists and steering tweaks. Again, this feels incredibly rushed.

• When it comes to the gameplay, there are brief flashes of potential, especially when it comes to racing computer controlled cars. In the most recent NASCAR games made by Eutechnyx, the computer cars would race in a pack and bog down inexplicably off the corners. It made passing 10 cars in the span of two seconds possible, assuming you didn’t get bogged down with them and crash yourself.

The AI in NHE struggles after starts and restarts; but after a few laps it feels much more like a real NASCAR race than previous games have. That’s a huge positive, though there are still flaws.

• You have the options of arcade and simulation mode. Wanting a fairly real experience, we chose simulation, which allows you to make setup changes to your car. Simulation mode also offers a supposedly more real racing experience.

When in simulation mode, the slightest side contact initiated from an AI car can make you lose control. If you want to bump a driver in front of you out of the way (like Joey Logano did to Matt Kenseth at Kansas in 2015), good luck. More often than not you’ll simply bump draft the car through the corner as the car in front of you is still somehow planted to the track.

AI cars will also inexplicably slam into you while you’re racing them for position. I experienced this more than once while attempting to pass cars at Kansas. I wouldn’t be pinching the car below me and somehow I’d get pushed into the wall at random for no apparent reason why the computer car goes on its merry way.

• Wrecks need a lot of work. Texas was the only place I saw the computer cars crash into each other and it happened a lot. One crash happened when I slowed down for Kyle Larson’s car grazing the wall in the tri-oval in front of me and I got piled into by about 10 computer cars behind me.

Damage in the accidents is very hit-and-miss. You’ll see on the on-screen graphic that your car is damaged but you can’t always see it visually. It’s also at times not apparent which computer cars are damaged after an accident either.

• One of the accidents at Texas happened in turn 2. I stopped behind it and waited for the caution to come out. After choosing not to pit I cycled to the restart. After I took the green flag, my spotter finally said “crash in turn 2.”

This is a pattern. The spotter is so delayed that it’s almost useless. You’ll see a car to the inside of you long before your spotter will tell you there’s a car underneath you. And it’ll be a half second before he says “clear” as well.

•Maybe this says more about my driving style than anything, but I found it impossible to pass cars on the inside when I found the right difficulty setting. I could do a decent job on the high side in the corners, but you don’t have too much room if you’re attempting a pass on the inside. And if you clip the apron in any fashion, your car is going to bobble or spin.

• Choosing your necessary level of difficulty is a lot harder than it should be. Why? Because there’s no way for you to tell how fast the computer cars are going outside of what you see on the track. There is no leaderboard feature within the game to check your lap times against the computer cars’ while you’re practicing.

That ability seems kind of important, doesn’t it? The game keeps track of your 10 fastest lap times in a given practice, but unless you have a great memory, you don’t know what lap those times came on. And you have no idea where you rank against the field.

• On that note, there’s also no track map feature. The track map feature, showing where the other cars are on the track in the corner of the screen, is something that’s been a mainstay on NASCAR games for a very long time. It’s not in this game.

And if you’re racing with the camera view behind the car, you have to either remember from the controls screen on the main menu what button makes the rear-view mirror appear at the top of the screen. It doesn’t automatically appear. There’s also no ability to look to the side or behind you with the right joystick, either.

Oh, and when you decide to pit during practice to make changes to your car, the 60-minute practice clock resets when you go back out on track. Every. Single. Time.

• When you figure out if you’re running competitive lap times with the AI cars, it’s impossible to pass them when you get to a race. And that has to do with the lack of realism in the driving model. The lack of horsepower and throttle off time in the corners is incredibly unrealistic. If Sprint Cup Series drivers really did give their input for the game, it was either ignored or misutilized.

Cup cars routinely reach speeds of 200 MPH entering the corners at 1.5-mile tracks. And with the reduced downforce in the cars for the 2016 season, corner speeds are also slower as drivers are forced to stay off the gas longer and use the brakes even.

There’s no need to use the brakes when you’re at a big track in this game. And we’re not even sure if tire wear exists too. During a long practice run at Atlanta I ran my fastest lap of the run on lap 11. That lap included, at most, a half-second off the throttle in turns 1 and 2 and full throttle through turns 3 and 4.

Again, I was full throttle through two corners at Atlanta on 11-lap tires. This isn’t even remotely possible.

• I found that the game was the most competitive on the 105 percent difficulty setting. I could pass cars during practice but it was infinitely harder to do so during the race. But 105 percent in the game is more like 85 percent compared to real life speeds.

The pole speed at Kansas Speedway this May was 28.3 seconds. My fastest laps were consistent laps in the 31.4-second range in practice — and I was catching other computer cars.

There are also many user reports of 17-second laps at Bristol being common on the game’s top difficulty setting as well as other absurdly slow lap times. I can’t verify that because I can’t race at Bristol.

• Those slow speeds are possible in this game because of the lack of horsepower your car has. Since top speeds are held down on the straightaways, you don’t need to slow down very much in the corners. It’s like (I assume) driving an Xfinity Series car rather than a Sprint Cup car. If I played with the setup in my car, I don’t think it’s too farfetched that I’d be able to run flat out around Atlanta or any other 1.5-mile track for a number of laps.

Once again, I’m not expecting an incredibly realistic simulation. But a small taste of realism on a mode titled “simulation” isn’t too much to ask for.

• Don’t think about tweaking your car’s gear ratio for better top speed, however. The tachometer on the screen goes to 10,000 RPM with the red zone between 9,000 and 10,000. Your top RPM on the straightaways typically doesn’t pass 8,000 on the default gear, leading you to believe that you can make fourth gear higher for better speed.

Nope. We tried this at Texas Motor Speedway and it was disastrous. RPMs barely cracked 8,000 after a gear change and the engine blew after less than two laps. Yes, really. It’d make sense if we over-revved the engine and blew past 10,000 RPM. But that didn’t even come close to happening and we ended up with a busted engine.

I could go on, but I’m going to just stop there. This game is a massive disappointment so far and I hope that the game’s developers make some huge fixes to a lot of these problems. If my opinion of the game changes for the better, you have my word that I’ll write a post here saying how and why.

But I am already resigned to the fact that it’s going to be another year at least until there’s a chance for a good NASCAR console game. And that’s frustrating. I appreciate that Dusenberry Martin Racing made the game and at least attempted to create a semi-realistic NASCAR experience.

I’m going to give the game more chances. But I’m only doing so because of my intensely strong desire to play a (good) NASCAR video game, not because of anything the game has showed me so far. If I didn’t have the anticipation I had for the game, I’d likely already be considering a way to try to get my money back.

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Nick Bromberg is the editor of From The Marbles on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at nickbromberg@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter!

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