About Ultimate Driving:
I bought this game to help me learn UK driving. I had mixed results, and the game has a lot of problems. But overall I think it did help me, so I am giving it a conditional thumbs up. You must have at least a gamepad to be able to play this title, because I found the keyboard and mouse controls to be unusable. If you have a PS or XBox controller then you should be able to get something out of it. Firstly, for UK drivers, there is no UK mode. However, there is an Australian mode, in which you drive on the left and the steering wheel is on the right. The Aussie road signs are not similar to UK ones, but I did not find that to be a huge problem. They are quite easy to understand. The bigger problem for UK drivers is that the city driving does not feel like UK driving at all. In this game the streets are wide, it’s more intersections than roundabouts and there’s less of the narrow streets crowded with parked cars and traffic-calming measures that we would expect over here. I played this game with a PS5 controller. It was just about manageable with enough tweaking of the sensitivity settings. With keyboard and mouse I found it unplayable, because steering the car was either too sensitive or not enough. I suspect this game would be much better with a steering wheel, pedals and VR – but I did not want to drop that kind of money on peripherals just for this game. The driving does feel like ‘real’ driving to some extent. Reading the road, scanning junctions, watching for other drivers, using the mirrors, signals, trying to figure out the right lane and get in it – it’s all there. As a learner I do think it helped me to improve, which is why I give it a thumbs up overall.
