Assetto Corsa EVO

Most Early Access games get bigger. Assetto Corsa EVO has been getting smaller, and that's the story here.

A note on what this review is: EVO launched into Early Access on 16 January 2025 and is still there in August 2026, at version 0.8. Everything below assesses an unfinished product, which is the fair way to treat it — but nineteen months and NZ$59.95 also make it fair to ask what has actually arrived.

The driving is not in question

Get this out of the way, because it's the reason anyone tolerates the rest. KUNOS make the best consumer driving physics in the business, and EVO's model is a step beyond the original Assetto Corsa. The tyre behaviour, the weight transfer, the way a car communicates through a wheel — this is state of the art, and reviewers who are furious about everything else say so in passing. "Yes, the physics are good," writes one 30-hour critic, before spending four paragraphs on the rest.

The update record backs the effort. Across 2026 alone: version 0.6 in April with new content and driving improvements, 0.7 in June with four new cars and an entirely new particle system for smoke and dirt, 0.8 in July with a major VR rework and user-generated-content support, plus hotfixes within days of each. In June they introduced EVO SR, a safety-rating system for the daily racing portal built around how cleanly you race others rather than how fast you are. That's a genuinely good idea and it's the kind of thing that makes online sim racing bearable.

A dedicated server app also now exists and is being maintained — worth noting because a widely-upvoted September 2025 review objected specifically to community servers not being self-hostable. That complaint has aged better than the reviewer expected.

Then the subtractions

Online-only, to drive alone. At launch, content was gated behind a server connection, so when the servers buckled on day one — as they always do — players were dropped into an "offline mode" with a handful of cars. A 576-vote reviewer with 335 hours called it "a $32 offline tech demo that's effectively online-only," and another pointed out the industry had already punished Gran Turismo and Forza Motorsport for exactly this. Twenty-seven of the hundred most-helpful English negatives landed in that first quarter.

The economy removal. This is the pivotal event, and it's why the negative reviews spiked again a year later — 22 in the first quarter of 2026 and 19 in the second. In February 2026 KUNOS announced they were removing the in-game career, XP, virtual currency and economy-based progression. The top-voted review in the game's history, at 1,999 votes, is a direct response: removing "one of the most essential selling points of the game with almost 0 community feedback is absurd." Another, at 794 votes, notes the progression "was a big selling point for me and already present in the game since day 1."

Early Access exists so developers can change their minds — that's the deal, and I'd defend it. But there's a difference between iterating on a feature and deleting a pillar people paid for, thirteen months in, and the distinction is exactly what those reviewers are drawing.

The open world. It formed a large part of EVO's pitch: free-roam driving on real roads between circuits. Recent reviewers are blunt about where it is. "1.5 years after release still no open world," writes one at 56 hours in August 2026. Another says hearing "that open world is out from the book makes me sad that I bought this game at launch." Fourteen of the hundred negatives mention it.

The trajectory

Here's the number that decided this review's score. Lifetime, EVO sits at 53.5% positive in English. Of the 100 most recent English reviews, posted between mid-July and early August 2026, 49 are positive.

Almost every game I've assessed recently has moved the other way — Starfield, Once Human and Football Manager 26 all show current sentiment well above their lifetime badges because sustained work eventually landed. EVO is drifting down instead, nineteen months in, despite a genuinely diligent patch cadence. That tells you the problem isn't execution speed. It's direction.

One more figure worth reading carefully: the median playtime among critical reviewers is 5.8 hours, far lower than the 100-plus-hour medians common elsewhere in this library. On a sim, that's what the launch online-gating did — a lot of people never got properly in.

The verdict

Assetto Corsa EVO earns a 6. If you buy it purely as a driving model — a place to practise, feel a car and race cleanly online — it is already excellent and arguably the best thing available, and I'd not argue with a sim racer who bought it on that basis tomorrow.

The score is where it is because a game is more than its best subsystem, and everything around this one has contracted. It shipped requiring an internet connection to drive by yourself, removed the career progression it launched with, and still lacks the open road it was sold on. Its own audience is recommending it less this month than it did last year, which for an Early Access title should be impossible.

Wait for 1.0, and when it arrives, check what's in it rather than what was promised. If you want a racing game you can enjoy today without an asterisk, Forza Horizon 5 remains the easier recommendation — a different kind of driving entirely, but a finished one.