Le Mans Ultimate - Review

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That this game was even released and that, against all conceivable odds, it became a resounding, big, hitchhiking monster hit - seemed like the least likely thing to happen in the sim racing genre. This because Florida-based Motorsport Games was down for the count. Ready for bankruptcy. Their Nascar game was cut off at the knees, they lost the BTCC licence they built a game on, cancelled three upcoming titles and released so few (and pointless) updates to Rfactor 2 for a couple of years that it looked darker than Cameroon's dugout (RIP Arne-H). Le Mans Ultimate just couldn't succeed. It would barely be released and it would, of course, be completely overrun, overtaken and outclassed in the sandpit by giants like Assetto Corsa and Iracing. But this was not the case.

Le Mans Ultimate was rolled out in alpha form at the end of February last year and despite a slow start, the sim racing world generally agreed that the studio behind Rfactor was putting together the foundations of what could be a really good racing game. I jumped on board straight away, as I always do with this wonderful sub-genre, and since the alpha release I've played some Le Mans Ultimate, keeping up over the past year and watching Studio 397 think right, do right and polish up a little diamond. At the end of last week, the 1.0 version was rolled out and Le Mans Ultimate is thus called 'finished' which means that I am ready with a rating. Can this game really compete with Assetto Corsa: Competizione, Iracing and Automobilista 2?

The answer is yes, although I'm still missing a lot of the promised content we've been waiting for over the past 18 months. The important thing though is that the foundations are well-built, the fundamentals are really good here and, having said that, 397 of course has all the opportunity in the world to build out, expand, improve, polish and grind what's already on offer here. Le Mans Ultimate is the only licensed, official WEC game on the market at the moment and as with all sim racing titles, it stands or falls on the tyre physics, which are really well done here.

397 has borrowed a lot from Rfactor 2 and then added parts that I think come primarily from Automobilista 2. There is simply a tolerance in the slip angle of the tyres here that allows me as a driver to drive my WEC car (whether it's a Hypercar, LMP or a GT3) harder and more aggressively than is possible in, for example, Iracing and Assetto Corsa Competizione. There is a tolerance in the tyres that I personally think is more in line with real racing than in say Iracing where the tyres feel like they allow for a single driving style and anyone who tries anything else gets penalised. I can push my AMG GTR more here than in any other competing simulator except Automobilista 2 and when the tyres give way and grip is lost, I feel it with great clarity in the steering wheel and can parry before the car is lost in a spinning skid beyond all possible salvation.

The movement of weight within the cars' chassis is also brilliantly conveyed and the detail offered by the game's phenomenal force feedback is the best in the genre, hands down. Studio 397 has for many years been the best at conveying what is happening in the chassis and tyres through the steering wheel and so here too. Sometimes, in my opinion, there is a little too much detail in the steering wheel, but it is of course no problem to slim them down a bit during longer races in the settings, which makes it downright absurd to use it as a minus point. The FFB here, is brilliant. Nothing else. The feeling of how the dampers work when the GT3 Porsche niggles under hard braking or how it feels when the tyres step up on the curbs at Spa, is unbelievably good.

Almost as good are the graphics, which I would have happily described as fantastic had it not been for the lack of optimisation. On the whole, Le Mans Ultimate is one of the genre's absolute best-looking simulators with very well-made car models, very well-built tracks and perfectly trimmed colour scale / lighting that builds a sense of realism without being as cartoonishly drawn as it can sometimes be perceived as in especially Automobilista 2 and Iracing. However, as I said, there are some minor issues with how the game has been optimised and many of the problems I encountered are not really understandable. I've been playing Le Mans Ultimate lately with an RTX 5090 and a 9950X3D and despite all the hardware power that my gaming computer now houses, this game hiccups at times and behaves as if there are problems with how shadows in particular are loaded. A race against AI cars can run smoothly while the next race, the same amount of cars on the same track in a different car - can be coughing/crashing like a game in the beta stage that has not yet been tuned in. I assume that Studio 397 solves this and it is not a huge problem for me, but the long loading times and the uneven optimisation on the other hand must be taken care of.

The sound is brilliant, though. Straight through - too. Studio 397 have really managed to find their way through the plethora of engine sounds, dome sounds, environmental sounds and effects available and their sound engineers have managed to get the amount of reverb they've applied to the engine/exhaust sounds that roar inside the cars just right. There is a rich, musky, messy character to the way the cars sound here that is easy to like and a lot of body to the sound, which relatively many games in the genre sadly lack.

Le Mans Ultimate has thus reached 1.0 status and thus "final release", despite this, it is not really a finished game in the way we were promised beforehand. If you buy the game for £25, you only get the 2023 WEC season and thus have to buy for 2024 and soon also 2025. If you buy the deluxe edition for £64, you get all the current DLC but there is no single-player content, career mode and pretty much everything else besides online-based multiplayer racing where the Rfactor team has obviously put all the effort. Which I think is quite the priority, it has to be said - but that doesn't change the fact that this is a simulator simulating WEC cars and perhaps not a fully-fledged "racing game" in the way we've come to expect.

To call this completely finished is a bit misleading in my opinion, but of course it's not difficult in today's gaming world. Huge games like Call of Duty: Warzone, Battlefield 2042 or why not Fallout are also released in an unfinished state, at full price, which gamers (more or less) tolerate. So I'm not going to complain too much about the fact that 397 hasn't really reached 'final release' in terms of functionality and content. Le Mans Ultimate is basically a really good racing simulator whose online racing portion easily competes with the best of the genre and whose tyre physics, FFB and graphics/sound do the same. If Studio 397 is given time now to continue building, polishing and expanding, I have no doubt that this could become the new ruler of the sim racing genre.