i...don't think i have ever been left this speechless by a video game before in my life.
im gonna simple this into pros, and cons to start off.

PROS
the game looks amazing.
the game sounds good.
the spotter at random starts rapping.
that's it. that's all i can give it.

CONS
the fact i payed 89 bucks for this ♥♥♥♥.
no rear view mirror
no mini map (even through their is one on the race menu tf)
career mode is just season racing with nothing else. no car owner team owner nothing. just racing the season, that's it.
no private online lobbies
cautions pretty much don't work ever. if you get a yellow flag its a good day.
Daytona duels is just gone.
putting tape on your car for some reason takes like 10 whole seconds extra on your pit stop.
pits in general just don't work. once again ai takes over and seemingly cant control the car, spinning and crashing in pit lane even getting stuck and just giving up at times.
the ai in general. its some of the worst ai ive ever seen in a racing video game. constantly spinning out, slowing down on straights, truly awful.
glitches. oh my lord is this game overwhelmed with them. every race i tried, i would find a different game breaking glitch.
game graphics settings constantly change themselves in race
cant turn steering assist off
can properly tune your car, just 5 settings of lose and tight. real nice guys.
game usually crashes you when starting a practice session/qualifying. sometimes you start with a dead engine
almost always car is damaged when starting, it usually has some form of front end or rear end damage
game crashes constantly
the warp glitch. google it. its worse then the pause to speed in heat 1, 2 and 3.
ai randomly speeding up/slowing down/the entire game speeding up except for you how does that even happen.
no stage racing. nice.

there are so much more but that's most of what i experienced. to go into more detail
Talledega and Daytona the ai slows down on turns on every difficulty, so cody ware could even win at those tracks. at darlington i couldn't practice or qualify cause every time i tried to start, my ai crashed before he got to the start line for me to take control, and blew a tire, and the on time i did cross the line my engine was dead. Daytona had a huge massive crash with no caution, dirt Bristol is just entirely broken, and i got black flagged and the game teleported me to the infield in a empty area under yellow that stayed that way cause it wanted me to pass a car when i couldn't move. my ai got stuck spinning for 5 minuted when trying to leave the pits at Bristol, the game crashed 3 times on me. the steering assist. god. the steering assist, it made almost any straight unplayable unless i was doing 197, the game constantly fights you on any input, rapidly swinging your car left and right like a mad man, its like driving with a backseat driver that's actively trying to kill you, it makes a flat straight surface the hardest part of the game.

i could go on and on but i feel their are going to be people who can cover everything else wrong with the game better then myself whos only played for 1.7 hrs. they said this game was not gonna be like the heat series it was not gonna be heat 6, they were right. at least the heat games were playable. i can say with 100% confidence this game is worse the heat evolution. despite how awful that game is, i can play it without a major game breaking glitch happening every race. congrats motorsports games, you managed to make not only the worst nascar game ever, but kill 704 games who was finally starting to make decent games. nascar needs to fire these guys asap, 6 chances 6 games and i thought we were finally getting somewhere with heat 4, 5 and the srx game. only to lose every bit of progress. im done with motorsports games, waited nearly 3 years for this. this is what we got. this is grade a trash, and they say first impressions go a million miles, well. this game is dead on arrival. avoid this at all cost. this is nothing but shiny trash. the title holder, of the new worst nascar game. good job motorsports games, you guys suck.
10/28 aka nascar refund day.


So update it appeares Motorsports games is getting involved with and selling nfts. It’s been a while and they haven’t made a single attempt to actually fix this god awful ♥♥♥♥ mess of a game, but they are full force pushing the nft agenda. Absolutely disgusting. I hope to see this company go down in ball of flames. And they are gonna try and make a Indy car game too? Not likely. They are already struggling bad with funds, i think they will be lucky if they make to the end of the year. Thankfully nascar is trying to find a new publisher, I hope indycar will follow. And to the people I’ve seen defending this god awful company, people like you are the reason this trash is acceptable in the modern day. And I’m sure those same people are the ones who will be buying their nfts. Pathetic. You’ll buy anything with the nascar nameplate on it. Open. Your. Eyes. Dumbasses.

Seriously, ♥♥♥♥ you motorsports games. ♥♥♥♥ this game.
Nascar 21 misfire.

I don't think I've ever played a more broken, lazy, sloppy and unfinished game on launch in my life.

We're talking Sonic 06, Ride to Hell: Retribution and Big Rigs levels of broken.

I am not joking you.

- No steering wheel support. None. When I played it, only the G29 was supported. Maybe. My T300RS? Forget it.
- No control rebinding options. None.
- Numerous game crashes out of nowhere.
- Calamitous handling which *NEEDS STEERING ASSIST ON MEDIUM* to be even slightly driveable.
- Braindead AI that CAN'T DRIVE DOWN PIT ROAD AT 40MPH without bugging out and wrecking.
- After one of these incidents where the AI took control of my car on pit road then crashed it back onto the track at Daytona, the AI then took over my car and drove it around the track for me in a soft lock loop until I quit out of the race.
- No cautions. A 30-car pileup could wipe out an entire grandstand full of fans, and this game isn't throwing a yellow for it.
- No repairs. See that cutscene of your crew guys hammering and sawing at your car? Makes no difference. And I'm almost certain the same is true for the AI too.
- No setups.
- No car adjustments.
- No stages or playoffs.
- No Daytona Duels.
- No Xfinity Series or Trucks.
- Career mode is an absolute nothingburger. You could just run every race in Single Race and get the exact same experience out of it. THE DRIVER NAME DOESN'T EVEN CHANGE ON YOUR CAR.
- NO REAR VIEW MIRROR OR MINI-MAP. LIKE EVERY RACING GAME EVER MADE SINCE 1987.

This game is absolute garbage, and worse, it's an insult to players. This game was absolutely not ready for release in any way shape or form. I don't care how many patches or fixes they rush out now, the game should NOT have been released in such a broken state to begin with. Oh but hey, the pre-order bonuses and season pass were all working fine on launch, right?

And as for influencers telling folks to buy this game anyway to support them and help them improve it? Bore off.

Motorsport Games aren't some tiny indie developer, they are *literally* part of the huge, multi-million-dollar Motorsport Network media empire. They've bought up and absorbed reputable developers and companies into their monolith, and signed exclusive licensing deals with NASCAR, BTCC, WEC, Indycar and the ACO. Yup, these guys are the reason iRacing can't host an official Le Mans 24 Hours race anymore. Wonder why there's all those glowing reviews and hype pieces about the game on Autosport, Motorsport.com, Motor1 and Traxxion.GG? ALL of them are owned by Motorsport Network, the parent company of Motorsport Games.

And this was their first major release. A sloppy, unfinished mess that they thought they could sneak out and con people out of their money because it's got the NASCAR name on it.

You might be lucky and have a slightly better experience than I did. And maybe after rounds and rounds of patches and fixes, the game is vaguely competent or even good. But I'm reviewing based upon the game I played on release day (28/10), and this was my experience.

And that experience was one of the worst gaming experiences of my life.

I *was* looking forward to those BTCC, Indycar and WEC games you've got in the works, Motorsport Games. Not anymore.

I really, really hate not recommending racing games. There's a chance this game MIGHT be worth your money after several more patches but that seems unlikely - and here's why:

Part of the deal for getting the NASCAR licensing is that Motorsport Games has to publish a title each year. Generally you want your games to align with the start or (at the latest) middle of a sport's season. Many of you will notice that this game released right at the end of the NASCAR season, and (by extension) in Q4 before the holiday sales. These two things are probably not a coincidence.

Keep in mind, this means they have to release a game in 2022 as well - and they're probably not going to want to wait until the end of the season again to put that one on the market. They're already working on that game *now*.

So I hate to say it, while '21 might get a few small fixes here and there, I suspect it will be treated as an insultingly-priced beta test for the '22 game. And it's Motorsport Games - they know how to make good racing games, '22 will probably be a much better experience. Unfortunately they've earned a lot of bad rep with this current title and are going to have to really work to get fans back on board. There's plenty of competition for oval racers on the market - MSG can't count on the license alone to make this franchise successful.

Give us an experience like NR2003 or Thunder 2004. People will throw money at you.

JUST PLEASE REMOVE THE GAME FROM THE STORE. PUT IT IN A VAULT. AND INCINERATE IT.

incomplete, unoptimized, unplayable. easily the worst gaming experience i've had in a long time. near-instant refund.

This should never be allowed to sell and should be removed from the store.

Motorsport Games loudly proclaim in press releases that they are "a leading racing game developer", but this couldn't be further from the truth.

In combing through NASCAR 21's credits, they are primarily a team of Russian web developers who are completely unfamiliar with NASCAR as a sport, and merely threw assets into an existing sim racing engine built by someone else - without even bothering to test if they work. What's more egregious is they seem to have roped several major racing series into partnering with them, weaving an expert and rather meticulous web of lies that these brands will undoubtedly spend years undoing via legal battles.

NASCAR fans have been caught in the crossfire, left with a defective product while the sport experiences a small but very important resurgence.

NASCAR 21 is outright missing basic features seen in all other racing games, such as a rear view mirror, the ability to adjust your force feedback, calibrate your wheel, and map individual buttons, or the ability to adjust your car setup. Custom online lobbies don't exist. It took the development team close to a year to add an analog fuel gauge that doesn't even display the exact amount of fuel remaining, but is rather just a colored indicator that is difficult to read while driving. This somehow took a year.

The actual on-track gameplay falls apart at a level I've just never seen before. There are games that didn't live up to the hype, there are bad games, there is shovelware, and then there is NASCAR 21 - it just outright doesn't work. If the game doesn't crash loading a race, the AI are several seconds off pace in qualifying on the highest difficulty, or are unable to make a single lap without slamming into a wall - one after the other - or causing track blocking wrecks. The AI cars can't draft each other. They can't avoid wrecks. It's pathetic. You simply can't race in this game.

The pit stop sequence adds several unnecessary seconds by slowing your car to a crawl before the animation actually begins. Cars line up on the incorrect side of the track. The caution flag is displayed before the race starts. The spotter frequently makes incorrect calls. Tracks are missing important traits or are just modeled flat-out incorrectly. The basic AI lines have the AI doing all sorts of weird stuff from missing apexes, to blowing braking points, to running into walls, across every track in the game. Little to no care has been taken to "hide" some of the AI grip hints, so from corner to corner AI will drastically slow down and then rocket right by you.

This game is going to result in a lawsuit. The company has blatantly misrepresented itself and have been caught with their pants down. NASCAR 21 has zero redeeming features, even with the 2022 expansion, and is a lesson to investors and license holders to please do your homework. NASCAR fans unwilling to brave the hardcore and often intimidating and toxic world of iRacing are stuck with a defective product that in reading up on the history of those involved and paying attention to quarterly investor calls, seems to have been the result of a stock market scheme.

My disappointment is immeasurable and my day is ruined

Gex on Playstation 1 is better than this.

best part about it was getting the refund