Get your story straight – TOCA Race Driver

**TOCA Race Driver** (Codemasters, PlayStation 2, 2002)

Previously on TOCA: Codemasters took the licence to a mildly popular British motorsport series and used its mixture of simulation and accessibility, followed by some careful expansions, to turn it into several successful games. But with powerful rival series Gran Turismo excelling on the transfer to PlayStation 2, and the real-life TOCA doing no great shakes, could the new generation be a step too far for our plucky challengers?

In most aspects, TOCA Race Driver follows the conservative model of Gran Turismo 3, of revisiting familiar ground with upgrades. It doesn’t even have to downsize in the same way, offering a very similar range of world-spanning circuits and competitions to TOCA World Touring Cars. Each six-race championship is nicely bite-sized with just long enough to start getting some interesting championship rivalries competition going, and the balance of shorter races with slightly longer ones with enforced pitstops works well.

The racing if anything feels even more artificial than its predecessor, with you in a completely different race to anyone else. Every other car has rapid straight-line speed which you can only dream of, but they’re all being driven by drivers with a terror of corners and an oversensitive braking foot. It never comes across as believable, but as a way of making the racing exciting, encouraging you into one daring dive up the inside after another, it’s effective in a brute force way. And TOCA Race Driver retains the sense that your rivals are actually in competition with each other, right up to the point of forcing each other off the road ahead of you, which is a lot of fun to react to.

So far, so equally good as TOCA World Touring Cars. When it comes to the PS2 upgrade to how the racing looks, things get a bit less impressive. The cars and their collisions certainly look better, and there’s more detail to the surroundings, but it’s not a particularly transformative difference. And worse, while I am in general forgiving of graphical glitches (and, for instance, couldn’t tell you what frames-per-second it was running at if my world championship title depended on it), TOCA Race Driver has some pretty bad ones. Trees and buildings in the distance popping into view as you approach is one thing, but when they flicker in and out, sometimes when your car isn’t actually moving, it can’t help but be an unwelcome distraction.

But outside of its upgrades of variable quality, TOCA Race Driver has one grand innovation. It has… a plot. You are not a featureless nominal individual to name as you please, collecting points to advance. You are instead Ryan McKane, petulant white American rookie who, as a child, watched his racing driver father die in a fiery wreck after a crash caused deliberately by another driver. Collecting points to advance. At each stage of Ryan’s advancing career you get short cutscenes, partly dependent on your performance.

Ryan also has a successful driver for an older brother, and their soap opera bickering provides much of the plot up until the ludicrous revelation that a rival British driver is actually the guy who killed their dad, living under a new identity. As a novelty distraction and way of adding variation to the game’s pacing it all works pretty well, giving more of a sense of occasion to big wins, although I already found being forced to play as Ryan grating and I share many of his identity characteristics.

Much worse than the plot is that alongside it Codemasters added incidental detail from the world of motor racing mostly consisting of sequences of identical silent grid girls, composed with a level of tight-cropping male gaze that makes Ridge Racer look restrained. As a result of the general atmosphere of leering those provide, the plot’s romance sections come off even worse than they would otherwise (script sample: “I hope you can handle a race car better than you can handle a woman”).

That’s one example of how when something is put into a game it’s hard to separate it from all the other elements, and that extends to the racing too. By coincidence I started playing TOCA Race Driver on the same day as Romain Grosjean climbed from the terrifying fiery wreckage of his F1 car, which certainly coloured how I viewed the death in the intro, but I think it would have weighed heavily on the experience anyway. Ryan is, in all the cutscenes, a guy in the shadow of his father. You’d think he would have strong feelings about the right way of racing.

But in my playthrough, when it came to the races, he — I — had a general policy of smashing other cars out of the way with nary a thought for their occupants’ safety. This is something happily encouraged by the game, which doesn’t offer any penalty for the approach, narrative or otherwise. None of the post-race interviews picked up on that one, even when they were asking about his family. This question became a curiously dark gap sucking at the edge of proceedings. It’s by no means a new or unique issue within games, but it wasn’t one I ever expected to come about while racing Saabs.