Progression...
So what’s with the medals then? Well, as you complete the courses in within certain time limits, or hit certain targets, you earn medals. These unlock other parts of the game and later, more difficult sections of the part you’re in. Try and play an unlocked section and the game will tell you what you need to win to get there, which spurs you on to go and do it.
Which brings me to my first gripe… It seems that once you’ve won a race, the AI ramps itself up to match your last performance, which is fine and dandy as having races that are walk-overs would be no fun. The only trouble is that it makes it damn near impossible to win a gold medal in any race you’ve previously won bronze or silver in. If you’re lucky enough to fluke a gold first time out, you’ve no need to go back to the race, but if you need that gold medal and you silver placing was a few tenths behind the gold medal time, you’ll have to pull something VERY special out of the bag.
The temptation here is to load up a new profile and race the tracks you’ve learnt bagging gold in each one first time out as the AI cars go slower. It’s very helpful that the AI cars are coloured according to where they’ll place, so you know that if you beat the silver car ahead of you you’ll score silver, but I’d say that on some tracks, gold is just a touch out of reach as you have to do some very skilful driving indeed to nab the top medal.
An example of this is on one of the 4x4 races, where the gold car shortcuts a corner by leaping across the gap THROUGH a support strut’s arms. Unless you are pixel perfect with your driving you’ve got no hope of making the same jump, and even if you do you have to be perfect with the angle you took off at or you’ll land all squiffy as your car spins in mid-air. As well balanced as the rest of the game is, it is maddingly annoying to see gold disappear over the ramp in a puff of tyre smoke because you landed slightly off on the last jump or you went a shade wide in the last turn. Nadeo could’ve made the AI timings a little more forgiving as the targets you’re set are so tough in places they seem near impossible.
That said, Nadeo have taken the step of ensuring that AI cars don’t ram you into the barricades by not having any collision model between cars. Don’t bother trying to ram another car to slow down as you’ll pass straight through it and the he do the same to you. Though this seems like it’ll be an annoyance at first, it soon become obvious that really all you’re doing is racing ‘ghost’ cars which represent your medal placing should you beat them… and with the aforementioned need for fine control, I’m sure that being barged off the track by an AI car at a critical moment would’ve seen my monitor being kicked all over the garden