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Severely delayed, hobbled at launch and with key features being drip-fed throughout its lifespan, in many ways DriveClub has been the poster child of this generation of consoles to date: a fractured beast that's taken a long, painful time to find its feet. And so it is that, nearly nine months after the release of Evolution's driving game, the PlayStation Plus version that's advertised on the back of every launch PlayStation 4 box is finally here. So what's changed, and is DriveClub worth returning to?The way we cover games has certainly changed in the time since, and after a turbulent end to 2014 that saw the likes of Assassin's Creed Unity, The Master Chief Collection and DriveClub endure troubled launches we were moved to tweak our review system to better reflect this new world of day one patches and shifting online services. Returning to Mike's original review, a snapshot of DriveClub pre-launch before its updates, and before its servers fell down, much of his criticism stands. The slightly bland veneer to its world and its racing remains, and beyond the glistening visuals it's still hard to pinpoint what exactly Evolution is doing here that hasn't been done before, and often done quite a bit better.
Yet in the long months since, through the aches and pains and via a handful of significant updates, something has happened to DriveClub that makes it worth playing. Slowly but surely, Evolution's vision has come into focus, and what's emerged is a preening, muscular arcade racer, an heir apparent to the likes of Project Gotham Racing. Beneath a game wrapped up in the foibles of the modern age there's an example of a genre that was long thought to be consigned to history.
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