After purchasing car x street deluxe edition I was having quite a grand time, and then the drift cars pack dlc was added ! Having purchased the deluxe edition and it being included I thought surely I would receive it, very excited I was as I would get the new p2w parts !!!
Well, then I log into steam and I see I don’t have the drift cars dlc I am very confused as it was included in the deluxe edition.
I went ahead and opened a support ticket with steam to have this resolved, first they claim I never brought the deluxe edition, to which I did and showed receipts, then after days of back and forth I check again and they have asked for proof that it is even included in the deluxe edition !!!
They have removed it from the deluxe edition now??
Anyway as I was prepared I did have screenshots of it in the deluxe edition. I have since sent these to steam and am waiting a response. Will update review once I get a resolution. This is disgraceful service by both the dev team and steam.

No witty introduction or quotes. That's simply my conclusion after pretty much two full playthroughs of CarX Street. I wouldn't have played this game nearly that much if I didn't like it. Indeed, there are lots of things I like. But I still struggle to fully recommend it...

This game has its roots in a mobile game, which can be seen in some UI and gameplay elements. The actual graphics and art style are fairly good: nice and clean art direction, though at times a bit too clean. The city really pops at night, its coloured billboards and neons a treat for the eyes. Car models are a mixed bag, with interior modelling and textures suffering in some examples. Expect a handful of annoying visual artifacts, whether it be smearing and ghosting from TAA, or aliasing from the other AA methods. Photo mode is hilariously basic with no options to adjust motion blur, depth of field, or anything you can really think of.

There are about 23 songs to listen to. Variety is a little weak, and none of the tracks either stand out on their own, so the soundtrack ends up repetitive pretty quickly. Car engine noises are extremely inconsistent: some vehicles are alright, others have weird pitch, and several more are extremely grating or completely ill-fitting. There's blatant AI voice acting in the prologue... I turned off all dialogue and subtitles within 5 seconds of being granted control, and didn't feel like I missed anything.

On high graphical settings, 1440p resolution, and a Ryzen 9 3900X, 64GB RAM, RTX 3070, Windows 10 64bit system, I mostly had a 60fps experience. However, a good chunk of the time it was also in the high 40s-low 50s, which felt quite less smooth but still playable. I can confirm the reports of stuttering, even when the game is installed on an SSD, but in my experience they were very infrequent and tended to be just one large spike per session. With that, you've been warned.

You're a street racer, freshly landed in the cleverly named "Sunset City." I'm pleased to say that, on the driving front, CarX Street is quite good. You can throw around cars by their inertia, break traction in most any way you can reasonably think of, yet never feel fully out of control even in the fastest of drifts. I spent equal lengths of time on gamepad and on keyboard, and never felt like I lost finesse even on the ol' arrow keys or WASD. You can quickly toggle on-and-off some assists like automatic gear shifts or a traction control, to minimize wheelspin, which is also helpful. What's much less useful is the presence of some permanently-on assists, which make extremely tight low-speed drifts and spins way harder than needed. You can fiddle with some assist sliders in the options menu, but they don't change much if anything. Otherwise, pretty good driving feel.

The map is open from the start, with roads and points of interest to discover. Peppered around the world are gas stations, tuning and visual shops, car dealerships and houses. Exploration is incentivized with minor cash gains and collectible wrecks, which can unlock extra cars from the dealership. Tyre wear and fuel depletion are modelled in a simple manner, so it makes sense to pay the ol' pump a visit fairly frequently. Depletion rates aren't too bad, and you can mitigate them through driving habits and various vehicle upgrades like larger fuel tanks. "Sports" fuel is a noobie trap and WILL bankrupt you in the early game, for little perceived benefit.

There's a lot of variety in terrain and road layouts. The main city is PACKED with interchanges, overpasses, side streets, parking garages - almost everything you'd want from a major urban environment! To the west are winding mountain passes aching for some tight drifts, and over to the north are long, sweeping bends through the hillside settlements. Its overall size tends towards the compact end, but the map is pretty much perfect for gameplay (if not quite realistic)...

...Which hurts even more when the actual race courses barely take advantage of it. Most circuits are two block-wide circles at most, laps often concluding in about a minute. Many sprints are especially egregious, taking not even a minute to complete. Potential shines through in the few races that carry you for longer distances and at varied speeds, but everything tends to blur together pretty quickly - there's just not enough event variety. The AI is mostly a pushover: while they have an advantage in collissions, they can be intimidated off the ideal path if you're close enough, and rubberband in your favour.

You gain currency slowly by just driving cleanly, drifting and doing various stunts. You win more from the freeroam quick challenges, and a lot more (relatively speaking) by winning club events. That money then can go into upgrading and personalizing your car. There's a surprisingly in-depth tuning system, allowing you to change the rev limit, torque curve, transmission losses, weight distribution, steering angle, wheel offsets... Huge plus for gearheads, despite some baffling ommissions that only car enthusiasts might care about. Similar story for the visual side. Body kits for days, but you can't mix and match fenders, and lots of body parts are locked behind specific choices or "require extension". Bah.

So what do you drive and race towards? Good question, honestly. There are some 11 clubs to race in, each club with its own required car class and rating. Clubs take between 15 and 19 races to complete, and outside of a neat little cutscene at the start of the final race in each, it's practically the same thing across them all. The only differences are that three clubs only focus on drifting, while the rest are straightforward circuits and sprints. Extremely repetitive. Beating a club unlocks elite events, which are infinitely replayable but otherwise IDENTICAL races from the club - you just get a handful of extra Streetcoin™ and then have to wait 15 minutes for the next race in the same club.

Ah yes, Streetcoin™. Remember when I said this is a mobile game? You have two currency types, with this coin thing used for top grade engine/body/suspension upgrades... for some reason. You can't even buy this type of currency with real money, so what's the point?

Race rewards slowly scale up as you progress through the clubs, but nowhere near enough to let you start to experiment with cars. The more expensive the car is to buy, the pricier the upgrades are as well, which is maddening. You grind, and grind, and there doesn't feel like any fulfillment. When the final race against a top-spec supercar at 350+kmh rewards me with a freaking hairdresser's coupe, I start to doubt my senses. There's not even a cool cutscene, or a "You're Winner!" text upon completion - just, whoop, back in the open world again like nothing even happened.

Is the multiplayer any good? Couldn't tell you directly. Every time I joined MP after launch, there were at most just two clusters of people doing tandems in different parts of the city. No one wanted to race, and probably for the best - every multiplayer event is structured as a zero-sum game, since everyone pays to enter the race but only ONE driver gets the WHOLE prize.

Expect some 20 hours of playtime to beat every club. Devs are slowly adding new content, including as basic a feature as a livery editor with no ways to share wraps. I only got the Deluxe Edition, which granted a few extra cars in the dealership, but doesn't offer additional post-launch DLC.

CarX Street has great mechanics but barebones content. It's long in the tooth. If you just want to drive and customize cars, you can do a lot worse than this. You can also do a lot better.

-Add carbon fiber parts/material -improve optimizations cuz I still get stutters occasionally