I’m a sim racer with a passion for Motorsport, good racecraft and the tech side of sim racing. I made SIMRACINGCOCKPIT.GG as a place to share my experiences. I hold an International Class C race licence and write for sim racing store G-Performance and Motorsport resource Driver61.com
Featured Image: Exocross
ExoCross, the lovechild of DRAG: Outer Zones and iRacing’s acquisition spree, is visually extremely tempting. The moment you see the trailer or some gameplay footage, you’re probably thinking “This looks cool”.
Exocross isn’t really a sim; now is it sim-cade (yet?). It’s placed somewhere in a middle ground that (in my opinion provides short, much-needed bursts of relief from high-pressure, competitive sim racing. And, without wanting to spoil my article, I liked it. I like it because my 8-year-old adores it. It’s accessible, the gameplay is very simple and it works well with his XBOX controller. Hours of distraction in the summer holidays. What’s not to love?
Getting started is a doddle. Pop over to Steam, acquire the game (I suspect it’ll be on sale soon), hit download, and the download/installation process begins. It’s a 4.5gb download (I’m not sure if the repack version of this reduces the file sizes at all). Whizz through the usual game-style intros and (cool) music and you end up with a nice settings screen:
First thing you need to do is head straight to settings and review controllers, and graphics.
I’ll add a caveat, I haven’t bothered testing Exocross with a direct drive wheel. XBOX compatibility seems to be the name of the game in the controller settings, so my best guess would be a Moza R3 might be easiest to get working with Exocross.
We’ve got one of these got one of these, and the be perfectly honest I wanted just to get driving and enjoy a gamepad, instead of having to setup a wheel.
Graphics settings next:
ExoCross runs on the Orontes engine, which sounds cool and, to be fair, the game does have a nice graphics/physics engine. Who knows – we may even see a port of this engine in iRacing someday.
I’ve been running Exocross on my Samsung G49 with an RTX 3080 Founder’s Edition and a 9th gen Intel i9. Not the newest or most powerful gaming PC by any means (it’s my work machine!) but: Exocross is not a challenge for this system on ultra settings. There are features to play around with supersampling, triple buffering, motion blur, anisotropy, and so on. I’d be surprised if you had to make any real compromises on graphics setup unless you’re on a much older PC than me.
The physics is where things are impressive. Exocross runs on a 4CPT (4-way contact patch traction) model which, in plain English, it’s a physics engine unique to its original creators. This, as I understand it, is why iRacing acquired Orontes in the first place. Exocross might just be a big extended demo of what’s actually in the pipeline.
Content-wise, you’ve got 19 tracks spread across four “biomes” (extraterrestrial planets), each raceable in both directions. You can select a variety of track configurations and directions for races, which adds some variation to the gameplay. There are three cars to master, each trickier than the last – but critically for the youngest gameplayer in the house, you can customise the paint job!
Online racing is a bit of a mixed bag. The voting system for track and car selection is a nice touch but the lack of custom lobbies is a bit of a head-scratcher. I didn’t get the full online experience as the game left me waiting for much too long to match with other players. I don’t know how busy online multiplay for Exocross is and didn’t give it much thought.
My son happens to be a big fan of Fall Guys – that style of online gameplay (knockouts via missing qualification) might work well in a simcase style setting. There’s more work for the dev team to do here. That’s all.
In any case, the single-player options are decent. You’ve got your Championship mode with AI racers, and a Challenge mode that can win you positions on the leaderboards.
It’s not exactly a heavy career mode, but my point of this whole article is that Exocross is perfect for our younger sim racers. My 8-year-old was plenty happy with what’s on offer; he’s at an age where over-complexity will just put him off.
He tended to focus on the single races to learn the circuits. Smart!
Now, it’s not all sunshine and space rainbows. There are some YouTubers who are particularly critical of Exocross. I think these guys ought to get over themselves. Exocross is fun and easy to go racing. That’s all some people want! Genuinely, this is a nice break from competitive sim racing games – I’m happy for it to occasionally grace my monitors.
All in all, ExoCross is a solid effort and I liked it. It’s not going to dethrone your hardcore racing sims, and it might not have the longevity of some other racers out there (unless, of course, a DLC pack arrives or a major update adds a bunch of stuff). It’s simple stuff and I think that’s OK.
If you’re after some sci-fi sim racing in some really crazy surroundings, it’s worth a spin. Just don’t expect to be tinkering with tyre pressures or working on fuel calculations – Excross is a different party.
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Topic: Sim Racing Games