tl;dr This game is fun, but overwhelming and, most of all, dead. Developers nowhere to be found. Stay away until further notice.

Victory: The Age of Racing is a racing simulator akin to stuff like Formula 1. I'm much more of an arcade racer (hence my repeated Black Flags when I play anything in here), but Victory does cater to my tastes as well by providing more arcade-like control over the vehicles than in something like F1 2013. The cars are very well modeled, and the tracks are pleasing enough.

However, the UI is incredibly overwhelming to me, and it's not intuitive for me to get around at all. I'm sure I haven't even discovered half of the menus because of how much there is to take in. Additionally, the multiplayer is dead and you'd be lucky to find anyone who plays this.

Most importantly, as other reviews have pointed out, the developers - Vae Victis Games - seem to have disappeared. They haven't said anything big since June, and the last we've seen of them at all was in October. The game itself has not been updated since April.

Stay away. This is a situation that we have to watch and see how it eventually unfolds.

This game is dead. Avoid.

This is just another "early access" game that's all broken promises, where the developers get paid for half a job done, then they disappear.

Worst of all, the driving mechanics are pitiful and ardcade-like. The graphics are initially impressive, but soon become tiresome and repetative.

Not worth your money, not worth your time.

Game is pretty dead, player-side and development-side. Looks good, sounds good, just is not implemented well, and doesn't have the playerbase as a result. Would not recommend.

Ive seen alot of reviews stating that this game is "dead" because there is simply no one online to race against. While this is true MOST of the time, (just recently raced against 6 other racers in a major event) those leaning on this one flaw in the game are missing out on alot of what Victory has to offer.

Victory: The Age of Racing is simply the best racing game I've played on Steam. Hands down. The blistering sense of speed is better than all but one of the many racing games I've experienced, F-Zero GX being the best in that category. The three classes of cars: Legend, Classic, and Formula, each have thier own handling characteristics and quirks, and each reqiring a different skillset to be brought to thier fullest racing potential. Combine that with probably some of the most fun and frustrating original tracks in a racing game (Mario Kart notwithstanding) and you have one hell of a racing experience. That, quite honestly, only gets better with the addition of rival racers. When they're on of course.

Car customization is another thing Victory has down. The paint room is very Forza-esque in it's function, but one thing I like about it better than Forza is the fact your graphics don't get warped on curved sections of your car. The decals curve with your cars curves, which makes painting replicas pretty satisfying. Plus the fact you can MAKE YOUR CAR LOOK HOWEVER YOU WANT IT TO. You want a crazy front wing that looks like it wont even work aerodynamically? Slap it on there! You want a two story tall rear wing on that Classic car? Go for it! Dont want wings at all? Who da heck needs downforce!? The styles of car are endless, and it's very interesting to see all the custom cars drivers make. From F1 replicas to "How is that even working?"

Also, well, going back to the point that there arent alot of people playing this game. The few who do, at least the ones that I know, are all really friendly. If you come in and see some one on, dont be afraid to ask questions. From what I know, the community in Victory recognize the lack in number of players and will help any newbie who needs help in anything. I will definitely answer any questions asked to me if im on. As you can see with my hours on record, I'm on quite a bit.

So dont let the "Mixed" reviews on this game turn you off to it. Ive had so much fun with this game in the near 10 months I've owned it, even made a few really good friends. If you see video games as an investment and not as an opportunity to have some fun, I can't help you there. But if you're looking for a well made racing experience in a fantasy setting, look no further. Come on in, theres a car with your name on it waiting to be driven.


No seriously, the cars have your name on them. It's pretty cool.


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P.S. Forgot to mention. It's small, but probably one of the coolest features in this game is the fact that you are still in control of your car after you cross the finish line. Adds a level of immersion I haven't experienced in any racing game I've played before.

Very good single player experience but......STAY AWAY....THE DEVS HAVE LEFT THE BUILDING and multiplayer is dead!

Pros

- Friendly community and players.
- Good gameplay and a lot of fun competing with friends.
- Customisable cars and decals.
- You can beat expert players at this game if you practice and don't give up.
- Has leaderboards, hotlap records, world records and race rankings so you can keep track of your progress against other players.
- Has single player hotlap challenge where you can practice alone on any track to improve your driving and hotlap record time.

Cons

- Slow Updates
- Underrated game
- People underestimate this as a terrible game for its graphics and that it is "not real F1 racing" without trying it first.
- Hardly anyone on the server except for regular players.
- New players give up playing this game too easily without practice and patience. Nearly happened to me when I was new but I managed to pull through.

It is a shame this game is underrated. But I would recommend this game for the friendly players and gameplay. Hopefully the new update will eventually come soon. (New graphic engine, Track Generator, etc.)

this one might turn out to be a great funny racing game. Thumbs up!

Before I begin, I just wanted to share a very important fact. This game was available for free through amazon. When I first found it on amazon, it was a free to play game. that's all well and good, but when I found it for $15 on steam, that got me kind of iffy on the whole thing. it basically told me that they're charging for something they were willing to give out for free. But, I can get past that.

What this game does well is customization and gameplay. the controls are solid, the cars feel weighty and there's a fair bit of options available to customize your car right off the bat. all plusses in my book. So, The reason I don't recommend this is because there was no offline modes to be found. every single race was online. on top of that, there really aren't enough people playing to fill a race. personally, I had a hard time finding just one more person so I could actually race. That's because the race won't start if you're by yourself. the only time it does is if you're in hotlap mode. but the thing about that is this: you don't get credit for hotlaps. Nope. no rewards for that. none.

All in all, Age of Racing is a story of high potential with all the resources already there. but the game was let down by always online gameplay that's even brought triple-A games to their knees. if they ever add offline, I'll recommend it. but as long as it stays online only, I can't bring myself to do it.

Though not specially a bad game, this one shows big concerns about the follow up. Few and very spaced news from developpers. They're actually showing few about their promises of future updates. I'm skeptical about seeing all their promises coming true.

I think it's really not worth the price in this current state.

I can't really recommend this game. It is beautiful and the controls are nice, however there is nobody online. Maybe once it's out of early access I can change my review, but even if there were people online to play with, the game has other issues. Namely, no controller support in any of the menus. It's very obviosuly designed for PC, which doesn't have to be a bad thing, but in this case it is. I'm trying to play on my TV while sitting back in my recliner and the menus are difficult to read and navigate. The UI is overly complex for a racing game, in my opinion.

To be honest: at the moment it seems to be a waste of money, buying this game:

There is no singleplayermode.
Nobody seems to play the game online, so you cannot race.

i'll uninstall the game and wait till it's finished (if it will be finished...)

Kinda good game but multiplayer is dead. And this game is multiplayer-based game, so this game is dead. Not worth to buy.

needs a LOT of work, very cartoony including physics. not really fun at all.

It has much improvements than the last time I played in alpha state. But it would be good if there's more cash rewarded from event. The amount of money rewarded after a race is so little, that grinding wouldn't make a significant different. Overall it is a good game with a lot of customization stuff. The thing that I like the most is you can make a car that looks like a Mini 4WD/Tamiya car.

This game is dead, no one plays, it has no single player, so I never got to play it
Bottom line : DO NOT BUY THIS

My last review was negative and i decided to change it because (in a very fast way) developers decided to change the whole "buy gears" system they had in earlier versions back when the game was Free-to-Play.

The game is really nice; and best of all is that it is an Early Access and you'll probably see a lot of changes and improvements.

Keep up the good work and THANK YOU FOR LISTENING TO US!

Grand Prix Legends meets TF2. Easy to get into, highly competitive but low numbers of players - A well balanced "simulation meets arcade" and the best parts of both stay in. Its not a hardcore racing sim, but there is something clever about the physics and the gameplay that makes it all come together very well for an early access game.

edited to add: There is now NO cash shop to buy stuff with the ingame currency "Gears", so its definitely not "Pay-2-Win". This followed the developers listening to the players and concerns from potential buyers during early access.

Used to be free to play, so previous F2P players can get a steam key.

Low player numbers is the only main concern, because there isn't any offline mode. This is an early release, so its a toss of a coin how or if the playerbase will grow. The game definitely deserves a chance.

Bristling with features and Italian flair. A super game. very stylish, fun racing. Best keyboard steering in the business, plus controller support, pleasing physics, nice community, its a hard one to put down.
Offers racing online with other players, hot lap events online, and you can create a public or passworded race, play on LAN as well, or single player hot lap challenges although this "single player" activity still requires you logged to the game servers online . You tweak your car till your eyes pop out :)

All the key features are there, matchmaking, friends list, race invites, stats, car customisation and setups and there is a track editor on the way plus procedurally generated tracks later, and probably steam workshop.

Some grim FPS issues in online races with some tracks/cars in the early access version.

Runs like a dream on a modest PC, although there is a bit of pop-up in the track scenery which is distracting and not what you expect from a race game in 2014.... maybe this will be fixed with the FPS issues when the game gets optimized. The online race modes works sweet as a nut, if you can find players wanting a race. A nice fast game browser, in game chat, in race chat, lobby automatically puts you in a queue if the race is full. Everything is well thought out and nicely implimented.

I'm going to go ahead and say this from the start, if the thumbs up didn't indicate it already. I highly recommend this game. Granted only for certain people, I understand not everyone likes racing games, especially ones that have some simulation aspects to it. This is more of a simcade, and as people have said about this before, it's easy to get into, hard to master.

I do call it how I see it though, even though one of the devs asked for me to review, I have no issue with that, and no, I'm not getting any kind of reward for it nor do I care for one, I just want to see the game succeed and get more players. Starting on developers, they are awesome. I had one personally work with me to troubleshoot an issue I had with the game crashing, and come up with a fix for it, and provided me with a modified .dll file to get the game working until the patch was released the next morning. (this was LATE at night, almost morning when it happened)
The game doesn't have many issues for me, but whatever issues it does have are being worked on by the devs atm. They listen to feedback and issues that the community encounters. Like the FPS problems some people are having. I was talking to a dev last night and they have acknowledged the issue and are working to fix it. In that process though they broke cockpit view online, once they quickly found out about that from players, they fixed it the same day. This is what more games need, devs that listen and actually work to change/fix things. I can forgive games that are broken if the devs ACTUALLY TRY. (I'm not saying this game is broken by the way, it is far from it) If you can't at least respect a developer for that, I've got nothing for you.

The community of this game, so far, is all friendly. This can of course change, as people are people and the more people that play, the higher chance for bad people to show up, that's just life, don't fault a game for that. There's a MMO like chat ingame, you have a public chat for anyone to talk in, a race chat for a race you're in, and a friends list separate from Steam and a racers tab to show EVERYONE online. You can check out their rank, nationality, and private chat from there. Quite simple and functional.

The driving mechanics ingame are quite nice in my opinion. It's definitely not a sim like Assetto Corsa, but it's not super arcadey like Need for Speed games. There's a good balance of fun and realism, combined with the options of automatic gear changing, semi auto, and manual, and various assists you can enable and disable on the fly. The cars all feel nice to drive too, they have good weight to them, you can feel the cars grip (or lack thereof), the cars respond to different surfaces, and changing car setup makes thing vary quite a bit. Running the default setup will work fine but you certainly get an advantage if you take the time to set up your car properly for a certain track, be it the under/oversteer of the car, the suspension stiffness to help cornering, the downforce levels, front/rear brake bias, and even gear ratios, and it does it in a fairly simplified but useful way. Their are descriptions for the settings on the side to help explain, and instead of some settings like camber levels and toe, and ARB settings and spoiler and wing angles, it's simple clicks left and right toward a different setting. I'm a huge fan of racing games in general, arcadey and sim. My main issue with sims is a lot are just plain better when using a racing wheel, which makes me happy to say this works EXTREMELY well with a gamepad. This itself makes it more accessible, which isn't always a bad thing.

The amount of content ingame is something I can't comment on too well right now, as I haven't played for that long. The game is only about 500mb though, so keep that in mind. There's a decent amount of tracks from what I've seen, and they're all fun, for me at least. There are preset cars ingame to buy, quite a few for each career and team, and some on the market (using ingame money).
But then we get to the car creator. You can choose between the 3 car types, and the different performance groups, then mix and match between different front, middle, and rear pieces of the car, and then change the paint and decals, and choose between a lot of different cosmetics like exhausts, brakes, rims, mudguards, steering wheels, etc. And depending on the car chosen, you get a different amount of PI to spend on your car. These are basically skill points in an MMO, you put points into things like braking, power, grip, etc. And in the same area you can select different engines and tires that will also change the PI settings of your car a bit. This adds a lot of personalization to the game and makes everyones car feel different. So in that aspect, there's a lot of content, and I'm sure there's more to be added.
A thing I forgot to put in somewhere about the car types: They're all F1 cars. There are the older ones running V6's if I remember, the Classics. Then you have the Legendary cars, I think these are using V8's ingame, I forget. They are based off more modern looking F1 cars though. Then you have the Formula class, these are using V12's ingame, and are the most modern looking cars.

When it comes to graphics, not too much to say. They aren't bad, certainly not the worst. If you really judge a game based on that, well, I don't know what to tell you. The gameplay is very good, the graphics work well and don't detract from the game. Fairly straightforward here. The only thing negative I have to say about that is with the graphics quality, there shouldn't be performance issues, but there are. BUT, like I said earlier, the developers are working on this right now. Like literally now.

Regarding peoples butthurtness towards "in app purchases". Yes, there are some. You can pay real money to get ingame money from what I understand. But it's optional. There's literally nothing you can get from that, that you can't get ingame by just playing normally, and it DOES NOT make up for lack of skill.

Any of these things are subject to change, as this game is still in Early Access and is being worked on still. This was put up on 2-14-2014. If anything changes that makes any of my points irrelevant or outdated, I'll try to remember and edit this.
I'll say again, I highly recommend this game for just about every kind of racing fan, and definitely for people that like F1 cars.
It's quite accessible too, so not being the best isn't a reason to pass this by.

This is one of the best racing games I have played in a while. You may think it is a simulator but in fact it is not. It may look like an arcade racer but it doesn't exactly feel like one. Granted the 'cartoony' feel may not appeal to some but that just adds to the fun when you are racing. The online side of things is great as long as you can in fact find a lobby to play in. The hot lap challenge is probably the best option when first starting out as it gives you a good feel for the game without others crashing into you. There are not that many tracks to race on at the moment though as this is early access you have to expect change and improve over time. I would highly recommend this game to someone who is looking for a race yet sort of serious and highly competitive racing game. If the price seems a bit steep for an early access game then wait till it is a bit further in development, although it feels really polished at this current stage.

A few things so far about Victory: The Age of Racing:
(This is not an actual review)

- The game menu looks quite satisfying and is clearly arranged.
- This game is definitely pay to win. Proof? The developers are presenting the "build your own car" thing as one of the main features. At the beginning you have already one car of each class so you can start right of racing. so far so good. to build your own car, you need at last (probably with extra parts and stuff a few 100 more) 5200 Gears Credits (the only ingame currency). If you win one of these early multiplayer races (don't know if its getting noticeably more when you progress) you get ~100 GC. So, to build your own the cheapest car of any class, without spending real money, wou have to win like 50 races. Races i've driven were appr. 4 - 6 minutes. In comparison: You can buy one of these predefined cars for the half of the price, which might be even a bit faster. So i think that the real money thing ones again ruins a game by slowing it down horribly, which equals pay to win to me.
- Gameplay is (after years of developement of this former-free-to-play game) like Mario Kart without Toads and bananas, but more buggy and erratic. But still quite fun to drive, a bit like trackmania. In conclusion this game is very arcadish, while it is published to have "realistic car physics".

One of the game developers once said in an interview with insidesimracing on Youtube (2012), that at the beginning, when they startet the title as free-to-play, they thought about not making one of these ptw games. Now the game is still in developement, is ptp and even ptw, too. I kind of regret buying it.

At the moment i have, to be honest, no MASSIVE complaint about the game how it is. It's okay, not more or less. But if you make the "mistake" to judge this game by what it pretends to be, it's absolutely not enough and seems like a bit of a hoax.

At the end i have to put a careful "YET", as the developers have time to and possibilities to fix these points, hopefully.