Racing games are in a league of their own. You can't really compare their experience to the likes of an epic RPG, intense FPS, or relaxing puzzle game. They have their own brand of peaks and valleys - for example, the highs of pulling off the perfect corner, and setting a great pace; the lows of wiping out on the final turn, and losing a race you were handily in control of. Racing games also tend to come in two flavours: Arcade, and Simulation. Arcade racers have loose controls, and are all about being fun - think of Need for Speed, Blur, or Ridge Racer for some examples. The Simulation side is what you'd expect from its name, they try to emulate real life and give you an accurate driving experience - several games do this very well, including Forza, Project CARS, and Gran Turismo. Sometimes, there are games that try to toe the line between these types of racing games, and Driveclub is one of these games. It does its best to find a happy medium between the two; but, ultimately, it never finds its own identity, and feels like a complete mess.
Evolution Studios have brought us some amazing racing games over the years (RIP). Personally, I am a huge fan of the Motorstorm series, and also really enjoyed the rally games they put out prior to that. Their track record is really strong when it comes to driving games, and you can tell they put a lot of heart (and effort) behind this game. The visuals are pretty spectacular, and suffice to say, they carry a ton of Driveclub's weight. The way the courses can dynamically change from day to night is uniquely satisfying, and the game regularly offers a visual feast. The car models look fantastic, and the way they reflect the vistas is beyond impressive - I could go on; but let's leave it at this: it is a gorgeous game. There are a few things to nitpick with the visuals, however. This comment has been made for years, but I'll reiterate it here, the damage modeling is pretty atrocious. You'll get some scratches on your car, but never any form of deformation. It looks fairly unnatural, especially if you happened to slam into one of the other racers.
Slamming into other racers will happen a lot, by the way. I do not exaggerate when I say that the AI in Driveclub is the absolute worst I've ever seen in a racing game. This includes AI from games that came out over ten years ago, it is just bad. All they care about is the racing line - they magnetize to it, and will rarely (if ever) leave it. That's all they really do, apart from the rare moments where one AI will bump into another, crash, and then try to find its way back to the racing line. It becomes so predictable that I started using them as a wall to bounce off of to help maintain speed during some corners. It's frustrating, because there is almost no challenge from the AI (even on the higher difficulty settings). If you can get into first place, they probably won't pass you unless you really mess up a corner.
The races do keep you engaged, though. If you do not approach this game as a purely single player game, then there's a possibility that you'll find some fun with its challenges. These show up mid-race as sections during the track where you will try to beat your friends in some category over that section. Things like having the highest average speed, following a particular racing line, or having the best drift are the types of challenges you'll face. These can be fun, and serve as a nice way to feel like you're asynchronously playing with your friends. I would like to see other games take this idea and push it even further - make these asynchronous leaderboards a thing of the future! The problem that you'll face is that if none of your friends have played Driveclub, these challenges will mean very little to you - for me, after a certain amount of progression, I stopped seeing my friends show up, and the challenges stopped mattering. This brings me to another point against Driveclub: As a single-player experience, it is terrible. The events themselves are never interesting, some of the medal challenges are atrocious, and the options available to you with regards to interacting with each event feel extremely dated. Did you want to rewind twenty seconds so you don't have to redo the whole race after a crash? Too bad. Don't get me started on the Drifting challenges either - they are so awful that after achieving the top challenge medal for one (just to say I did it), I put down the controller for two days out of pure hatred for that event.
The disappointment does not stop there, oh no. The best part about arcade racers is their feeling, and Driveclub kind of tries to go for that feeling. You are encouraged to drift, you can bounce off of other cars, and you hit crazy high speeds. But... Its attempts to be a simulation game get in the way. For example, if you go too far off the track, it will wag its finger at you with corner penalties, which limit your acceleration for a certain amount of time. But the thing is that if you look at the game from the experience of a Simulator, the choices they made to make it arcade-y really impede that too. You can't tune your cars, you get zero progression which make the cars feel any different, and it commits the most cardinal of sins: there are essentially zero options for assists or handling. The only option you'll get is how much braking assistance you get, which isn't worth having on anyways. There is no option for a racing line, there are no options for suspension, there are no option for tires, etc. You have zero control over anything that you'd potentially want to change, and that makes the whole simulation aspect feel incredibly shallow. Oh, and did you expect it to help tutorialize you on anything? Ha ha, good joke - I didn't know the handbrake was on the circle button until I tried doing a drift challenge and the square button wasn't doing anything. They don't explain anything about playing the game to you - even the way the game starts makes this obvious. The first time you load Driveclub, it puts you into a 2-lap race. It doesn't give you context, it doesn't tell you the controls, it just tells you to go, and then it brings you to the main menu. Baffling.
It sucks as a multiplayer game too, by the way. I played a bit of it with my girlfriend, and the options just weren't there to make it how we wanted it. Want to fill the empty slots with AI? Can't do it. Want to set up your own custom circuit? Nope, you can only select one race at a time and then pick a new one from the lobby menu. The options available to you are middling at best. There is also so much content locked behind DLC that, even if there were certain things we wanted to try out, we weren't willing to shell out for the DLC just to give it a shot. The netcode felt good, however, and to be fair we did enjoy parts of our experience; but, truly, I'm running out of things to try and compliment the game on.
A lot of effort went into the creation of Driveclub. You can tell that a lot of artists and programmers dedicated years of their lives into making the game; but there are just too many poor design choices to ignore, and playing the game is so seriously offputting that I cannot possibly recommend Driveclub. For every one thing it does well, there are five other things it completely fails at. I want to love this game, but it is just too frustrating. There are better options for you if you want to play a racing game on the PS4 - especially with the recently-released Project Cars 2. Do not play Driveclub, it just isn't worth your time.