When not moving through it, Hong Kong does look and (with the radio off and the sound mix refocused on environment) sound pretty good, and the cars also sound solid. The interiors of various locations you can enter — dealerships, Clan HQs, workshops — have a lot of attention to detail, though the trope characters populating them aren’t quite at the level of Baldur’s Gate 3.
But that’s pretty much it. When you do get moving, you’re more distracted by the pop-in, draw distances, screen tearing, and not exactly infrequent frame-rate drops — in 1080p60 “Performance Mode” on a ninth-gen console! That’s if you can take your eyes off the weird shine on every car, and inconsistent lighting.
And that’s to say nothing of the driving itself, where understeer is seemingly the only actual handling characteristic of everything, letting off the power is a more effective than actually braking, driving through destructible objects is more harmful than sideswiping buildings, and the AI appears to have its own rules entirely.
For a lot of people, the always-online, always-multiplayer aspect of the game (requiring a Nacon account, of course) will be an instant no deal — and I’m tempted to take a point off for a full-price game that also requires PS Plus/Xbox Live — but it’s not like the rest of the game is good enough that they’ll be missing out on much. Oh and that Nacon account requirement also means (at least on PS5), you can’t suspend and resume the game as you need to go back to the main menu to authenticate every time…