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Evolution GT - PC ReviewAt first glance it's kinda like Toca 3/DTM but this racing Sim has a few features not seen before in a normal racer, well not what I've seen before.
You start off as a Rookie once you've shown them your worthy of getting a sponsorship (i.e. yer do a race or two).
First race season is the Rookie season as stated, you have 4 sets of tournaments to do. Each tournament type has 3 or 4 races in each section. The four sections vary from: race tracks such as Hockenhien, or road races like London, Berlin or scottish highlands etc. And each race type varies the types of cars you can use, such as Clio's and Audi's to top end 2 door sport cars such as the Zonda or Buggati.
Each race you do you have to be in the top three to gain a Bronze, Silver or Gold. If you come 4th, then repeat race.
Once you complete the Rookie season you then pick the next sponsor and take part in the 'Amateur Season' and pretty much repeat the above.
Of course each season gets tougher and tougher. The seasons go upto:
Rookie
Amateur
Pro Season
Veteran Season
Once completed the Veteran Season you unlock the Secret Season, this is 4 races, 1 of each type in a top model car, the secret races are for the 'Ultimate Driver'. 
Well thats the background of it, but the reason why it's called Evolution GT is because as you progress through winning and doing nice moves such as cunning over takes, you gain experience points. Once you gain so much points you can put these towards skill points such as 'throttle control', 'steering control', 'break control'. Those sound the usual but you can also add points to your 'intimidation', 'confidence', 'concentration', 'hindsight', 'anticipation' and 'cunning'.
What's unique and annoying as hell about this game is the being 'intimidated', basically if you have someone right behind you, which you genereally do, especially as you go through the pack as you always have to start at the back of the gird, the game will make a hammeing heart beat sound, and once your intimidation bar reaches 0 the screen goes a wishy washy white blurr, which makes your vision as useful as turning the monitor off, while this happens your hearbeat is pounding away as you make heavy breathing noises. After about 10 seconds of this you gain control and your vision clears, however, if you haven't been using your skill points on 'concentration' your 'intimidation' bar very slowly if at all creeps back up, meaning the next car that gets behind you will have you looking at a wishy washy screen again in a second.
So that's the most awkward thing about the game, and on some levels especially near the end it makes the game extremely hard. One 5 minute race took me 5hrs of play to win it (Valencia in Veteran season, didn't help that the car was a crappy sports car with no grip!), and another problematic track was a Scottish Highland level in the Pro season driving a Golf GT I think it was.
Of course, as usual not paying too much attention it was only towards the end I started adding points to these weird skills, so I didn't help myself, that and I didn't do many of the challenge modes as I just jumped into the career mode (which are there to gain extra skill points). I did some of them towards the end though to help get some skill points together to boost the intimidation/confidence.
Of course by boosting your 'confidence' you can intimidate other drivers too, this is shown by their bar chart above their car, and once that runs out you start to see their car go all over the place. Which isn't neccessarily a good thing as half the time they will twat into you and knock you off, and as this is a racing Sim not an arcade racer you spin off very easily, and if there's a wall or baracade in the way youll take some damage and if you get knocked off the track into gravel or grass. you then move very slow and no doubt spin all over. So be careful!
Another feature this game has is the 'tiger effect' which works exactly like 'POP's sands of time' rewind time feature, a stupid idea for a realistic racing sim!! but anyway it does come in handy, you can also spend skill ponts increasing how much time you want to go back, as the default barely takes you back enough to prevent the crash your about to do or redo. A handy feature to help reduce the pause/race restart syndrome. I never spent any skill points on these, so I had to be pretty sharp to rewind time to prevent a crash.
Progressing through races also lets you upgrade your clothing gear, which also helps towards skills, I'm not sure how that works exactly but there ya go.
Graphics
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Stunning visuals, it's best feature are the detailed tracks and scenary, very pretty to look at, I played at 1280 res with all details on full and it was as sharp as 'PGR 3' on the 360 going from what I recall when watching that game in the shops.
Sound
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You can set the sound to 5.1, or stereo or headsets, depending on your set up, but I was a bit dissapointed by the car sound, it didn't have much 'umph' behind it, instead the cars sounded a bit tinny, which is a shame as a good car sound really enhances a racer. The heart beat panic and 'woosh' sound from slip streaming were a bit too loud compared to the car engines, but these effects were much better than the engines.
Physics / AI
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As a racing Sim you expect the cars to be tricky buggers, and they are, any slight clip of the grass or nudging a car or being nudged will have you spinning all over. While this is realistic it does make the game pretty tough to be accurate, and of course ya gotta be carefull. But if your too carefull then your gonna have cars right behind you wanting to overtake, meaning 'intimidation' bar going right down then wishy washy screen, arghh!
The AI is good, as your progress and get better, the same drivers from each previous season also get better. They also have a tendancy to whack you so when overtaking you have to be very wary of that, as any slight knock has you off. The downside is: when you bang into them or clip them they don't seem to spin off so easy, and they recover way too fast, which is annoying. But that all adds to a tougher challenge (of which there is only the default difficulty settings, so no dropping to easy to see you through a race...not that I would  ).
Overall
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I really enjoyed this racer, some of the cars and tracks (mainly Scottish Highlands) felt like the Colin Mcrae games, except your racing with others. Mix that with Toca 3 and that should give you an idea of what it's like. Some of the tracks felt quite easy to do, such as the inner city ones, if you compare them to some of the race tracks or the Highlands those are so much more tougher. Especially the highlands as the roads are very thin, and when starting at the back with 7 Golfs in front of you wavng all over the place you think 'how the hell do I get passed them!'. The Valencia track was the hardest for me, it's a normal race track but the corners are tricky and oddly shaped, that and you often race in crap handling cars for them.
So it was a good challenge of a racer, it has repeat value in the way you can go back to redo your silvers and bronzes to help obtain a full 100% The Graphics/AI/Physics were spot on, but the main let down was the audio for the engines. Warning, expect to get really annoyed at times! (I repeat - 5hrs redoing one 5 min race to finally get a bronze!)
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